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The Natural Robotics Contest: Crowdsourced Biomimetic Design
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This paper describes the Natural Robotics Contest, a crowdsourced biomimetic design competition that allows the public to submit nature-inspired engineering concepts that are then fabricated into real systems. The winning design in the featured contest was a robotic fish using gill-inspired filter structures to collect microplastics from water, fabricated as an open-source robot with a novel 3D-printed gill mechanism. The authors discuss how public submissions reveal perceptions of pressing engineering challenges and the value of nature-inspired design for environmental problems including microplastic pollution.
Biomimetic and Bioinspired design is not only a potent resource for roboticists looking to develop robust engineering systems or understand the natural world. It is also a uniquely accessible entry point into science and technology. Every person on Earth constantly interacts with nature, and most people have an intuitive sense of animal and plant behavior, even without realizing it. The Natural Robotics Contest is novel piece of science communication that takes advantage of this intuition, and creates an opportunity for anyone with an interest in nature or robotics to submit their idea and have it turned into a real engineering system. In this paper we will discuss the competition's submissions, which show how the public thinks of nature as well as the problems people see as most pressing for engineers to solve. We will then show our design process from the winning submitted concept sketch through to functioning robot, to offer a case study in biomimetic robot design. The winning design is a robotic fish which uses gill structures to filter out microplastics. This was fabricated into an open source robot with a novel 3D printed gill design. By presenting the competition and the winning entry we hope to foster further interest in nature-inspired design, and increase the interplay between nature and engineering in the minds of readers.
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The Natural Robotics Contest: crowdsourced biomimetic design
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This study described the Natural Robotics Contest, a science communication initiative that leverages public intuition about nature to crowdsource biomimetic robot designs, making robotics and engineering accessible to broader audiences.
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Researchers designed a biomimetic aquatic robot inspired by the filtration mechanism of sabellid worms to collect and detect microplastics smaller than 100 micrometers from water. The robot mimics the feather-like crown structure these worms use for efficient particle capture, targeting the smallest and most challenging microplastic particles. The study proposes this bio-inspired approach as a potential tool for both environmental cleanup and monitoring of microplastic pollution in aquatic ecosystems.
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Researchers designed an autonomous marine waste collection robot inspired by fish feeding biomechanics, integrating AI navigation, renewable energy, and an adaptive suction mechanism for capturing plastic debris. The dual-chamber vacuum system demonstrated energy-efficient marine debris collection, representing a bioinspired approach to ocean plastic remediation.
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Scientists are building better tools to design technology inspired by nature—like filters that mimic how animals such as clams or barnacles naturally strain particles from water. This new framework helps engineers systematically pick the best animal or organism to copy from, using a scoring system based on available research, uniqueness, and evolutionary traits, rather than relying on guesswork. The researchers tested it specifically for designing microplastic filters, which could eventually help reduce the tiny plastic particles found in our water and food supply.
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