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Bionics: Snails, Slugs, and Slime

02/23/05

So, you're taking a vacation in Southern California, and it's nice and warm out, so you're walking around barefoot in the grass, when you feel something squish under your toes. Nope, it's not the resort's resident dog; you've just accidentally discovered one of the world's most underutilized and amazing animals -- The humble land snail. But as luck would have it, researchers are working hard to put snails, slugs, and other spineless slimeballs into the spotlight.
Sea Slug

You've got to admit, the shells of snails are pretty incredible. Colorful, complex, and hugely functional, they are the slimy little guy's best defense against the world, and most noted achievement. But recently, there have been a number of other cool developments in the field of snail biomimicry, and some of them are a whole lot more useful than a snailshell necklace.

First off, take a look at the way that snails and slugs move around. You know they're slimy, but the real reason for the slime is to enable their motion. Basically, snails move in one of a couple ways. Imagine a carpet in a room. You can pick up the whole carpet, and move it over a small amount, or you can make a ripple in the carpet, and push the ripple from one end to the other, shifting the entire carpet by a small amount. The second way requires much less force than the first, and is one of the ways that snails scoot. The other way, is to put liquid (their slime) onto the surface, and use a series of rippling movements through their foot (snails have one large muscular "foot" which looks like a skirt underneath them). These movements pump the fluid back behind them, pushing the snail forward.

Neither of these methods of moving are very good for going fast, or for covering really rough ground. But the major advantage of them is their ability to move using no external appendages, and to stay stuck to a surface while moving. Since the snail remains stuck to the surface, they have the potential for very high-strength movers as well (Abalones can support hundreds of pounds of pressure when well adhered to a rock). These opportunities have scientists imagining all sorts of cool opportunities for snail-bots.

Both MIT and Case Western are doing research on snail movement, with the intention of building snail robots for exploration of internal human anatomy. For example, colonoscopies, while helped by ever-shrinking instrumentation, are still notoriously uncomfortable, because the spiraling intestine makes threading an endoscope difficult and painful. A robot which could gently pull a camera through the intestines or arteries would be able to find problems with much less damage to the patient's tissue. A video of Case's prototype is available here.

Also interesting, is the mode of movement in slugs and snails. These animals have no bones for muscles to push against; Instead, they use systems of muscles wrapped around tubes of fluid. This allows slugs and snails to be incredibly flexible and adaptable to different configurations of terrain. Currently, Case is developing a gripper system which can handle fragile, irregular objects much more carefully than current robotic arms, which is based on this principle. A chair using these principles might be much more effective at distributing weight and keeping fatigue from occurring.

Finally, if all this tech talk is a little too much for you, slugs still have something to offer. Sea slugs, or nudibranchs come in all shapes, sizes, and colors. If you saw one, and didn't know it was alive, you might swear is was a soap dish, massager, or plate scrubber designed by Ron Arad. Whatever you think of them, they're worth more than just a look.

So it turns out that these guys are good for something more than just escargot. Snails and slugs are some of the billions of Earth's animals which are chock full of fantastic design ideas, just waiting to be put to use. So get out there and start sliming things up!

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02/23/05

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