Biomimicry Strikes Again.
Can razor clams keep your boat from drifting away?
Image courtesy of www.washingtonsbestkeptsecret.com
Biomimicry has endless lessons to teach us about design, and one of the most amazing creatures on the seashore, the razor clam, is now the inspiration for a new kind of anchor:
"The best anchoring technology out there is an order or magnitude worse than the clam - most are two or three orders worse," says Anette (Peko) Hosoi for MIT. She and graduate student Amos Winter have taken a keen look at the mighty clam and have come up with a robot that can mimic how the clam digs itself into the sand, named, aptly, the RoboClam.
If you're having a hard time imagining how this might work, here's an amazing video of a razor clam at work.
