Aquatic Insects as a Source for Biomimetics

Understanding functional principles of materials, structures, sensors, actuators, locomotion, control systems, behavior of aquatic insects is of major scientific interest. On the other hand, this basic knowledge is also highly relevant for technical applications. One of the greatest challenges for today’s engineering science is miniaturization. Insects have solved many problems correlated with extremely small size, during their evolution. Zoologists, entomologists, morphologists, neurobiologists have collected a huge amount of information about the structure and function of such living micromechanical systems. This information can be utilized to mimic them for industrial applications. There are following main technology areas, where aquatic insect’s solutions may be applied: (1) materials science and technology, (2) surface science, (3) science of adhesives, (4) optics, (5) photonics, (6) sensorics, and (7) robotics. A few selected examples are discussed in this chapter, but having a great number of described aquatic insect species as a source for inspiration, one may expect a lot more ideas from aquatic insects science for biomimetics.

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