Biomechanical

Kinetic installation artist David Bowen has given a rhododendron a really big knife, the power to use it, and therefore, a degree of agency not enjoyed by the kingdom Plantae since the Cambrian era. His latest piece, Plant Machete, melds a woody shrub with an industrial robot arm and slaps a machete to the business end of it. On the other end, a series of electrical pickups monitor the bioelectrical noise generated by the plant. “The system uses an open source microcontroller connected to the plant to read varying…

NeuroMechFly, the first accurate “digital twin” of the fly Drosophila melanogaster, offers a highly valuable testbed for studies that advance biomechanics and biorobotics. This could help pave the way for fly-like robots, such as the one illustrated here. Credit: EPFLA Digital Twin of Drosophila“We used two kinds of data to build NeuroMechFly,” says Professor Pavan Ramdya at the School of Life Sciences at Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL). “First, we took a real fly and performed a CT scan to build a…