Spider legs build webs without the brain’s help – providing a model for future robot limbs

 

Image courtesy of Didier Descouens - CC BY-SA 3.0.

Joel Kontinen

Emeritos Professor Fritz Vollrath of the University Of Oxford has shown that in a study with his collegue Thiemo Krink, spider legs build webs without the brain’s help, which would be a model for future robots.

"Arachnophobes often cite spiders’ unpredictable movement as the basis of their fear, pointing out how each spindly leg seems to lift, flex and probe with a menacing degree of autonomy.

Perhaps unsettlingly, my colleague Thiemo Krink and I have conducted research that reveals that each one of a spider’s legs does indeed enjoy a certain independence from the brain – especially in the complex task of web-building.

Our study has shown that spider legs have “minds of their own”, constructing webs without the oversight of the spider’s brain. This has important implications for the field of robotics, which may take inspiration from this example of decentralised intelligence to build similarly autonomous robot limbs."

 In their study Krink and Vollrath  “observed the common garden spider Araneus diadematus, a creature familiar to us all – both suspended in our back yards.”

 The Roboticists call this tactic  morphological computing. According to vollrath, the common garden spider has been using this for over a hundred million years.

Source: 

 Vollrath, Fritz. 2021. Spider legs build webs without the brain’s help – providing a model for future robot limbs.  spider legs build webs without the brain’s help – providing a model for future robot limbs . The Conversation 10 February.