Biodiversifying bioinspiration

TLDR

Bioinspiration harnesses biological function for engineering, yet only a small fraction of global biodiversity has been explored, leaving many potentially valuable systems and evolutionary relationships untapped. The authors aim to leverage emerging digitization and analytical tools to mine biodiversity for engineering knowledge. They propose that recent advances in museum specimen digitization, shape analysis, function prediction, and large‑scale data analytics will enable this mining. This shift could timely provide insights that make technology more autonomous, adaptive, and capable in complex environments.

Abstract

Bioinspiration—using insights into the function of biological systems for the development of new engineering concepts—is already a successful and rapidly growing field. However, only a small portion of the world's biodiversity has thus far been considered as a potential source for engineering inspiration. This means that vast numbers of biological systems of potentially high value to engineering have likely gone unnoticed. Even more important, insights into form and function that reside in the evolutionary relationships across the tree of life have not yet received attention by engineers. These insights could soon become accessible through recent developments in disparate areas of research; in particular, advancements in digitization of museum specimens, methods to describe and analyze complex biological shapes, quantitative prediction of biological function from form, and analysis of large digital data sets. Taken together, these emerging capabilities should make it possible to mine the world's known biodiversity as a natural resource for knowledge relevant to engineering. This transformation of bioinspiration would be very timely in the development of engineering, because it could yield exactly the kind of insights that are needed to make technology more autonomous, adaptive, and capable of operation in complex environments.