Robotics and nature, from primitive creatures to human intelligence

For thousands of years, humans have looked to nature to find solutions for their problems. This trend has affected the robotics field as well as artificial intelligence, manufacturing, biomechanics, vision and many others. In the robotics field, there are many unsolved problems which amazingly have been solved in nature. These problems vary from basic motion control to high level intelligence problems. Insects ’ motion, human’s walking, driving, exploring an unstructured environment, and object recognition are examples of these problems. Robotics researchers have looked to nature to find solutions to these problems. However, what is missing is human-like computation ability. The presumption is that if we want to create a human like robot, we should implement systems which perceive and operate similar to humans. This paper is a survey on how robotics has been inspired by mimicking nature. It introduces different trends and reviews the modern biologically inspired technology. It also focuses on human perception and potentials for perception based robotics. The significance of this work is that it provides an understanding of the importance of perception in the design of a robot controller