1 Biomimetics: Using nature as an inspiring model for human innovation

The evolution of nature over 3.8 billion years led to the highly effective and power efficient biological mechanisms. Imitating these mechanisms offers enormous potentials for the improvement of our life and the tools we use. Humans have always made efforts to imitate nature and we are increasingly reaching levels of advancement that it becomes significantly easier to imitate, copy, and adapt biological methods, processes and systems. Advances in science and technology are leading to knowledge and capabilities that are multiplying every year. This brought capabilities that allow implementing ideas far beyond the simple mimicking of nature. Having better tools to understand and to implement nature’s principles we are now equipped like never before to be inspired by nature and to employ our tools in far superior ways. Effectively, through systematic studies of nature models for biomimetics we can learn better tools of how to copy or adapt its principles and mechanisms. A review will be given of various areas that were inspired by nature and outlook for potential development in biomimetics. NATURE AS AN INSPIRING MODEL Nature has always served as a model for mimicking and inspiration to humans in their desire to improve their life last [Bar-Cohen, 2005]. By adapting mechanisms and capabilities from nature, scientific approaches have helped humans understand the related phenomena and the associated principles in order to engineer novel devices and improve their capability. The subject of copying, imitating, and learning from biology was coined Bionics by Jack Steele, of the US Ai