Page 172 - Biomimetics: Technology Imitates Nature

Biomimetics: Technology Imitates Nature

and the robot lobster’s electro-mechanical sensors are intended to do the
same thing. 112

The Lobster’s Technique for Identifying Scents

Underwater creatures such as crabs and lobsters use their sense of
smell to find food, mates or to flee from predators. One study carried out
by researchers from the Universities of California at Berkeley and
Stanford revealed how lobsters smell the world around them.
Lobsters possess a very sensitive sense of smell, whose features will
open up new horizons for robot engineers trying to build new odor sen-
sors. Mimi A. R. Koehl, a professor of integrative biology in the College of
Letters & Science at University of California, Berkeley, says:
If you want to build unmanned vehicles or robots to go into toxic sites where
you do not want to send a scuba diver, and if you want those robots to locate
something by smell, you need to design noses or olfactory antennae for them. 113

Lobsters and other crustaceans smell by flicking a pair of antennules
toward the source of the odor, so that the chemosensory hairs on the ends
of the antennules come into contact with the water-borne odor molecules.
The spiny lobster Panulirus argus, which lives in the Caribbean Sea, has
antennules 30 cm (3 to
4 inches) in length. On
the outer edge of one
of the split ends of its
antennules are hairs
resembling a brush—a
region particularly
sensitive to chemicals.
A group of re-
searchers led by

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