Some extreme weather we experienced recently has left me looking at nature with renewed awe. It also made me think about the inventions that we use every day that have been inspired by nature, especially in the field of automation. This is biomimicry, and it involves studying how a plant or animal solves a problem, then stripping away the biology and applying the principle somewhere new.
My absolute favourite is Festo’s Bionic Learning Network, which explores what nature can teach us about gripping, moving and controlling objects in a factory. Over the years they have come up with one fascinating creature after another, ranging from a bionic kangaroo that demonstrates how nature’s biomechanics can improve energy efficiency and movement in industrial automation, to a pneumatic gripper inspired by the elephant’s trunk. Along the way there were floating jellies, a dragonfly that demonstrates ultra-lightweight structural design, autonomous swarm-flying micro robots called bionic bees, and a bionic ant which demonstrates cooperative behaviour on a large scale in order to carry out complex tasks. Another one is a seagull inspired by the herring gull that mimics the flight of birds. A few years ago, I was lucky enough to watch their Smartbird flying around the International Convention Centre in Cape Town. It got a standing ovation.
The product is not the bionic creature itself. The real value of the trunk is in showing that flexible, pneumatically driven structures can be safer than rigid arms when working beside people. A bee swarm shows the advantages of decentralised, self-organising systems rather than centralised control. Many of these technologies have been taken up in real products in pneumatic handling, soft robotics, motion control and adaptive gripping systems.
Another clever example is Japan’s 500 series bullet train. Engineer and birdwatcher, Eiji Nakatsu redesigned its nose after watching the kingfisher, which dives from air into water at speed without a splash. The original train produced a sonic boom each time it left a tunnel. The kingfisher nose cut air resistance by 30%, reduced electricity use by 15% and let the train run 10% faster.
The humpback whale is another one. Biologist Frank Fish and engineer Philip Watts found that the irregular tubercle bumps on a humpback’s flippers reduce drag and delay stalling. Their company, WhalePower applied the idea to wind turbine blades and industrial fans, and the result was better efficiency, lower noise and longer component life.
On the factory floor, Pittsburgh’s Gecko Robotics borrowed from the gecko’s grip to build wall-climbing inspection robots. A boiler inspection that once needed a 50 metre scaffold and seven days of downtime can now be done while the plant keeps running. Shell uses these robots to inspect steel tanks at millimetre resolution without shutting anything down.
Even Velcro began this way. Swiss engineer, Georges de Mestral came home from a hunting trip with burrs clinging to his trousers, looked at them under a microscope and saw thousands of tiny hooks catching on looped fibres. NASA later adopted his invention for zero gravity applications, and today, Velcro holds together just about anything you can think of, from aircraft assemblies to cables in a factory.
AeroSHARK’s sharkskin film is a 50 micron adhesive film covered in microscopic ribs that copy the drag-reducing texture of sharkskin. Applied to a fuselage and engine nacelles, it cuts around 1% of total fuel consumption per flight. Lufthansa and Austrian Airlines have fitted it into their fleets, logging more than 219 000 flight hours and avoiding over 39 000 tons of carbon dioxide emissions.
In 2025, an inchworm-inspired micro-inspection robot was demonstrated working autonomously inside the confined spaces of aero-engines, and General Electric developed a soft robotic system called the Sensitive Worm for engine maintenance. These designs are finding application in agriculture, forestry and infrastructure inspection.
Long before any of these robots existed, Eugene Marais wrote ‘The Soul of the White Ant’, after observing how a colony behaves as a single organism. He would have appreciated the Eastgate Centre in Harare. Architect Mick Pearce designed it after watching how termite mounds hold the inside temperature steady without any mechanical cooling, using vents that drive convection. Pearce copied the principle with passive ventilation shafts and a porous facade that absorbs heat by day and releases it at night. The building uses around 90% less energy for cooling than a conventional one of the same size.
All these began by questioning how nature solves a particular problem, and finding the answer in a gecko, a whale or an elephant’s trunk. Evolution was in action long before technology, and many of its solutions are still better than ours.
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