Bioinspired conceptual design (BICD): Conceptual design of a grasshopper-like jumping mechanism as a case study

Abstract

The evolution process of nature creates highly effective, power efficient, and perfectly structured biological systems. These excellent systems provide an inexhaustible source for engineers and scientists who desire to inspire ideas, processes, structures, functions, and behaviors from biological domain and implement them into engineering domain. This approach is called "Bioinspired" and challenging for engineers. However, some problems of the practical approaches are observed. One of the problems is "ad hoc" nature of the process. Each bioinspired design product has resulted in a differing design process and a generalization was not possible. Another problem rises due to the terminology difference between engineers and biologists. To overcome these problems, a need for a systematic bioinspired design (BID) process was realized in early 2000s and since then, considerable research on the BID methodology has been progressed. Within the context of BID, this paper introduces a new approach on bioinspired conceptual design (BICD) procedure for hybrid bioinspired robots which can be inspired from multiple biological systems. An illustrative case study is given in the paper.