Of Elephant Trunks and Robot Arms

The trunk of an elephant looks awkward, but it is a vital tool for the critter's life. When it trumpets by forcing air through the trunk, it is a form of communication as well as expressing emotion. It can be heard for a great distance.

As all y'all know, biomimicry is taking a concept seen in nature and adapting it for human purposes. This was applied when imitating an elephant trunk to design a robotic arm. Interesting how secularists admire things they design, but trunks came from evolution and chance, not the Master Engineer. But I digress.

Elephants using their trunks, Unsplash / Wietse Jongsma

Those trunks can be used for snorkeling (yes, really), visual communication, and other things. What robotics people wanted to study was the ability to grasp and the flexibility. They had to develop a special nonmetallic material and precise controls because the 40,000 muscles the elephant uses are beyond their ken.

Conventional robotic arms with their metal skeletal bars and lots of tubes are very cleverly designed, but it’s not advisable to get too close. As engineers have wryly noted, “Compliance is not a feature of traditional robotic assistants. This presents danger of injury and/or performance error.”

So, wanting to come up with a new design of robotic arm that would be safer to operate around people, engineers turned for inspiration to the elephant’s trunk. They were attracted by the fact that its trunk provides the elephant with “an appendage that is flexible, capable of transmitting large forces, precise, delicate and highly compliant.”

To read the rest, head on over to "How did the elephant get its trunk?"