Researchers manipulate deceased spiders’ legs with a puff of air to serve as grabbers.

Rice University mechanical engineers are showing how to repurpose deceased spiders as mechanical grippers that can blend into natural environments while picking up objects, like other insects, that outweigh them.

“It happens to be the case that the spider, after it’s deceased, is the perfect architecture for small scale, naturally derived grippers,” says Daniel Preston of Rice’s George R. Brown School of Engineering.

An open-access study in Advanced Science outlines the process by which Preston and lead author Faye Yap harnessed a spider’s physiology in a first step toward a novel area of research they call necrobotics.

Preston’s lab specializes in soft robotic systems that often use nontraditional materials, as opposed to hard plastics, metals and electronics. “We use all kinds of interesting new materials like hydrogels and elastomers that can be actuated by things like chemical reactions, pneumatics and light,” he said. “We even have some recent work on textiles and wearables.

“This area of soft robotics is a lot of fun because we get to use previously untapped types of actuation and materials,” Preston says. “The spider falls into this line of inquiry. It’s something that hasn't been used before but has a lot of potential.”

Unlike people and other mammals that move their limbs by synchronizing opposing muscles, spiders use hydraulics. A chamber near their heads contracts to send blood to limbs, forcing them to extend. When the pressure is relieved, the legs contract.

The cadavers Preston’s lab pressed into service were wolf spiders, and testing showed they were reliably able to lift more than 130% of their own body weight, and sometimes much more. They had the grippers manipulate a circuit board, move objects, and even lift another spider.  

The researchers noted smaller spiders can carry heavier loads in comparison to their size. Conversely, the larger the spider, the smaller the load it can carry in comparison to its own body weight. Future research will likely involve testing this concept with spiders smaller than the wolf spider, Preston said

Yap said the project began shortly after Preston established his lab in Rice’s Department of Mechanical Engineering in 2019.

“We were moving stuff around in the lab and we noticed a curled up spider at the edge of the hallway,” she says. “We were really curious as to why spiders curl up after they die.”

A quick search found the answer: “Spiders do not have antagonistic muscle pairs, like biceps and triceps in humans,” Yap said. “They only have flexor muscles, which allow their legs to curl in, and they extend them outward by hydraulic pressure. When they die, they lose the ability to actively pressurize their bodies. That’s why they curl up.

“At the time, we were thinking, ‘Oh, this is super interesting.’ We wanted to find a way to leverage this mechanism,” she says.

Internal valves in the spiders’ hydraulic chamber, or prosoma, allow them to control each leg individually, and that will also be the subject of future research, Preston said. “The dead spider isn’t controlling these valves,” he said. “They’re all open. That worked out in our favor in this study, because it allowed us to control all the legs at the same time.”

Setting up a spider gripper was fairly simple. Yap tapped into the prosoma chamber with a needle, attaching it with a dab of superglue. The other end of the needle was connected to one of the lab’s test rigs or a handheld syringe, which delivered a minute amount of air to activate the legs almost instantly.

The lab ran one ex-spider through 1,000 open-close cycles to see how well its limbs held up, and found it to be fairly robust. “It starts to experience some wear and tear as we get close to 1,000 cycles,” Preston said. “We think that’s related to issues with dehydration of the joints. We think we can overcome that by applying polymeric coatings.”

What turns the lab’s work from a cool stunt into a useful technology?

Preston says a few necrobotic applications have occurred to him. “There are a lot of pick-and-place tasks we could look into, repetitive tasks like sorting or moving objects around at these small scales, and maybe even things like assembly of microelectronics,” he said.

“Another application could be deploying it to capture smaller insects in nature, because it’s inherently camouflaged,” Yap adds.

“Also, the spiders themselves are biodegradable,” Preston says. “So we're not introducing a big waste stream, which can be a problem with more traditional components.”

Preston and Yap are aware the experiments may sound to some people like the stuff of nightmares, but they said what they’re doing doesn’t qualify as reanimation.

“Despite looking like it might have come back to life, we’re certain that it’s inanimate, and we’re using it in this case strictly as a material derived from a once-living spider,” Preston said. “It’s providing us with something really useful.”

Co-authors of the paper are graduate students Zhen Liu and Trevor Shimokusu and postdoctoral fellow Anoop Rajappan. Preston is an assistant professor of mechanical engineering.

Rice and a NASA Space Technology Graduate Research Opportunity award supported the research.

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Learn about the benefits of using the digital twin in CNC machining.

About the presentation Manufacturing is changing faster than ever before. CNC technology has developed dramatically in the past decades, extremely extending the machine’s cutting efficiency. Manufacturers are stepping into the new era of productivity improvement with digital twin technology. During this presentation, we’ll discuss how the digital twin can help a machine builder shorten their machine’s product lifecycle management (PLM) cycle by moving processes out of the critical path; how the digital twin can improve communication between machine builders and end-customers; and how digital twin technology can help end-users increase their manufacturing productivity and accelerate business growth.

Meet your presenter Tiansu Jing is the product manager of SINUMERIK CNC systems in the U.S. at Siemens Industry Inc. He has 14 years of experience in CNC applications, development, and marketing. Jing is currently focusing on digitalization of machine tools.

About the company Siemens is a global innovator focusing on digitalization, electrification, and automation for the process and manufacturing industries. We are a leader in power generation and distribution, intelligent infrastructure, and distributed energy systems. For nearly 175 years, we’ve developed technologies that support multiple American industries including manufacturing, energy, healthcare, and infrastructure.

CamInstructor gives employers the opportunity to educate employees online and in-person.

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Maximize your ROI on cobots & robots through faster deployments and redeployments with changing jobs.

About the presentation Manufacturing managers, engineers, technicians, and other industry professionals see the benefits of using robots for automatic machine tending processes. Justifying an investment in automation often extends beyond immediate needs to those unforeseen in the future. This session offers flexible automation techniques to more quickly re-task their equipment from one project to the next. It focuses on adaptable end of arm tooling and machine table fixturing for changing workpieces in a machine tool and even parallel processes such as fine material removal and gaging.

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About the company The company was founded in 1945 by Friedrich Schunk as a mechanical workshop. It developed under the leadership of Heinz-Dieter Schunk to a company that specializes in clamping technology and gripping systems. Today, the company is run by the third-generation siblings Henrik A. Schunk and Kristina I. Schunk.