Classroom Robophysics: Methods for teaching bioinspired design

In our Bioinspired Design course, students work in interdisciplinary teams to design engineering solutions based on biological analogies. Teams study core physics principles that enable biological functions and build prototypes to mimic these principles for applications in wearable technologies and robotics. Lectures cover current research in the area of bioinspiration, and the different design concepts and tools that can be used for bioinspired design. In this paper, we detail the approach the students undertake to distil the core physics principles and how to use them to create mechanical prototypes. The ultimate goal of the prototypes is to either solve an engineering challenge using lessons from nature, or to use engineering tools to study a biological phenomenon. In the course we present pedagogical tools to help students compare multiple organisms with similar functions but different underlying physics. Students are then asked to brainstorm different embodiments based on learned physics principles. They then apply design evaluation tools to choose the most suitable embodiment to solve the problem they identified at the start of the course. Students use their prototypes to verify that they captured the enabling physics rather than simply copying the superficial function.