When I started writing this article, I swung between intense urges to pen down my thoughts- scattered right from Karmic cycles to sustainability to stilling the mind to an extent where we’d collapse into black holes to harnessing all forms of energy the universe has to offer to creating robots that are natural yet innately denatured; and absolutely no desire to do it at all.
The following is what I settled on
One morning, when I was not particularly inclined to go to the office and was doomscrolling: I stumbled across Necrobotics. My first thought was, naturally- from all the fiction I had consumed: NECROMANCY. As I read on, it seemed as though all my desires of performing necromancy were coming true- while also sophisticatedly leaving behind all the sins on the path to achieving the necrotic effect.
The Third State:
If one were to come across a spider: what are your initial, raw thoughts on it? Some might appreciate the design of the web the spider has created, another would want to capture the creature at a particular angle- maybe with the sunbeam causing the web to glisten, a third might think of clearing it out so that the space looks spotless, and yet another might just scream at the sight of it.
View at Medium.comThese are all reactions to a “living” Spider. But what part of it do you consider to be living? The movement of the spider? The cobwebs it makes and inhabits? Demonstration of cognitive ability?
But all of these are branches of what is assumed to be the realm of “life” as in the conscious perception of the human being. What if life- not as we know it, extends beyond this realm?
Now again, “death” in the conscious perception of the human mind is the inanimate-ness of what was once an animate being- in this case the spider. What if life were to poke into the realm of death? And redefine what to live embodies?
Cruising along the same lines, we meet Necrobotics- the practice of using dead organisms in robotics to grip objects, manipulate human surroundings, move one inanimate object by re-animating what was once a naturally animate being.
For a long time, by long I mean since the era of mass manufacturing and consumerism gained unwarranted momentum: we have tried to outrun nature by creating machines to be more powerful, more efficient, effective and of increasing monetary benefit. Despite all of this, well into what might the peak of the 21st century, with Artificial Intelligence at its cusp- after decades of engineering, tinkering, perfecting and re-working, humans seem to be finally seem to be grasping at the concept that being in tandem with what surrounds and what makes us from within the is the most sustainable and sensible direction to walk in.
The Structure:
What could spiders that are already a part of our ecosystem do that robots haven’t already achieved? Can they hold and grip objects to manipulate the human world in more precise ways than human were ever capable of? Then answer is yes.
But they manipulate after death. With pneumatic or hydralics.
A wolf-spider’s body is split into two: abdomen and the cephalothorax (head and thorax fused together). 8 legs extent from the cephalothorax, each leg made of 7 tubular segments much like the 7 seven segment display, just arranged different.
Coxa: Attached to the body, much like the shoulder joint, where all movement originates- allows swinging forward, backward and sideways.
Trochanter: A small swivel joint, it allows for rotational freedom to angle the leg perfectly.
Femur: This give the spider’s leg reach and leverage. Main structural support.
Patella: This is like our knee. Placed between the femur and tibia. So, a spider has 8 knees.
Tibia: The lower leg. Works with the patella as a hinge joint. Both the tibia-metatarsus and femur-patella joints are hinge joints. These joints can ONLY flex inward using muscles. To extend outward, they need hydraulic pressure.
Metatarsus: Foot bones fused into one segment.
Claws: These are the hooks , like the velcro ones
Muscle Up:
While humans have biceps to pull upland triceps to push down, spiders have only flex muscles that essentially only expand or curl up.
Inside the spider’s thorax, there is a chamber, under pressure filled with hemolymph- this is a blue fluid as it is copper rich and not iron rich like our blood.
When the muscles around this chamber are contracted, they shoot the fluid into the legs causing them to extend. When these muscles relax, the chamber resets and the fluid is sucked back, causing the legs to curl-up. While the gripping is definitely the more visible, tangible part of this necromancy, the mechanics behind is such: the hemolymph is a non-Newtonian fluid. A non-Newtonian fluid is one that flows easily under pressure, and is pretty stagnant when not under duress. This was fluid dynamics engineered by nature, long before humans coined the term Newtonian Fluids and defined rules to make their life easier, when all the while, there existed an exact opposite but equally important mechanism that went against the flow.
Dead Lift:
The grip is not random. It is a mechanical sequence that is choreographed. The two front leg pairs are the first to touch the prey, its like a hug, but it’ll never let go. The prey is swept inward and downward. The middle pair doesn’t really grip, but stabilizes. It’s all about balance. Doesn’t allow the spider to topple over. Equilibrium is key. The rear pair push the prey inward and forward, deeper into the grip. This is how it works when the spider is considered to be living.
In necrobotics however, since we bring the dead back to the living world, its slightly different.
When a spider approaches it’s life after death, due to a lack of heartbeat, there is no pressure build-up, this causes the flexor muscles to curl up.
When alive, each leg is pressured up individually, but in the other world, the valves open permanently like a normally open switch. But it also means, that they are all connected via a single hydraulic channel.
This essentially means, all 8 legs are actuated at once, simultaneously. By inserting a needle into the prosoma- the cephalothorax’s hydraulic chamber, and sealing it with super glue, yes super glue, humans managed to control the legs without the heart. Heart-less.
A dead spider is frozen at -4 degree Celcius, to halt biological metabolism and preserve internal anatomy.
Push air in → pressure builds → travels through open valves → fills all seven segments of all eight legs → legs extend. Release pressure → flexor muscles in femur-patella and tibia-metatarsus joints → legs curl inward and grip.
A necrobotic gripper can lift upto 130 % of its own body weight, it can perform 700–1000 open-close cycles before the joints show significant degradation. Some researchers also experimented and figured that beeswax keeps the joints hydrated and lubricated. Over a course of 10 days uncoated spiders lost about 17x times more mass than coated spiders.
These necrobotic grippers naturally conform to the shape of the object they are gripping and successfully manage not to crush it. Assemblies in microelectronics is more functionally precise with necrobotic grippers.
In recent biohybrid robotics and 3D bioprinting of muscle-tendon interfaces, coupling these with the already perfect mechanical structures enables dexterous manipulation in soft robotics. This bridges biology and microelectronics as well as control systems- all diversely apart yet interconnected- almost like a blend!
Full Circle:
Nature spent millions of years perfecting this mechanism that we have been trying to mimic artificially- all a failure. If only we were to observe more closely, see that we already have the foundation required, moving right in front of our eyes- day in and day out, and wrap our heads around the fact that we only need to customize it to suit our applications with almost minimal gray matter- we’d be living more harmoniously.
hile we learn to truly adopt the live and let live policy, we should also first harness the energy of our surroundings to keep us going- without causing loss of life to any living being ofcourse- but in a manner where no organism goes waste without fully exploring its potential while also being mindful of its existence alongside others.
Though a digression, the point of the Kardashev scale is the proposal that we learn to survive and thrive with the energy that exists in our immediate environment first and gradually expand it to other parts- the city, county, continent, seas, stars, planet, galaxy, and multiple galaxies at the end, that is currently foreseeable.
Necrobotics is the first step that may help us optimally derive energy from our immediate surroundings to reach Type I of the Kardashev Scale, and keep going further up.
