“Necrobotics,” the act of reanimating dead things as robots, is apparently a thing now. And researchers at Rice University have chosen one of the worst things to reanimate: spiders. Spiders use hydraulic pressure, rather than muscles, in order to extend their legs. That’s why their legs all curl in when they die. The Rice team found that they could extend and retract the legs of spider corpses on command by injecting them with air in just the right spot.
Do dead spiders make good robots?
Answer: Yes, unfortunately.
Shutterstock/Vadym Lesyk
Just when you thought spiders couldn’t get any more unnerving, someone went and did this.
“Necrobotics,” the act of reanimating dead things as robots, is apparently a thing now. And researchers at Rice University have chosen one of the worst things to reanimate: spiders. Spiders use hydraulic pressure, rather than muscles, in order to extend their legs. That’s why their legs all curl in when they die. The Rice team found that they could extend and retract the legs of spider corpses on command by injecting them with air in just the right spot.
Why, you ask? That’s a darn good question. Apparently, these reanimated spider corpses make excellent grippers. On average, a single dead spider was able to lift 130 percent of its body weight and last for about 1,000 open/close cycles. “We’re interested in using them for things like sample collection,” said Daniel Preston, assistant professor of mechanical engineering at Rice. “They have an intrinsic compliance due to this hydraulic or pneumatic actuation that we’re able to apply, and that helps protect fragile samples or even other living bugs, for example, if we wanted to collect those in the field.”
“Necrobotics,” the act of reanimating dead things as robots, is apparently a thing now. And researchers at Rice University have chosen one of the worst things to reanimate: spiders. Spiders use hydraulic pressure, rather than muscles, in order to extend their legs. That’s why their legs all curl in when they die. The Rice team found that they could extend and retract the legs of spider corpses on command by injecting them with air in just the right spot.
