It is alive! Could a reanimated spider change how we think about robotics?

A dead insect repurposed as a gripper recently won an Ig Nobel. It’s not about what it can lift. It could help reframe the search for new materials in robotics.

The icky inspires Anoop Rajappan. Squishy dead spiders; leaves floating on a sticky marsh; the slimy insides of bhindi.

The natural design and chemistry observable in each of these hold clues that could help us create new generations of engineered devices, says the 30-year-old researcher, who has a Master’s degree and a PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and is now a post-doctoral researcher with Rice University in Texas.

The water-repellent leaves of the lotus, for instance, led

The child of engineers, Anoop Rajappan, from Kerala, grew up fascinated by the idea that small, often invisible, changes could dramatically alter a much larger whole.

“It’s a joy to work on a scientific question or idea that is both quirky and useful,” says Rajappan, who grew up in Kerala and graduated from the Indian Institute of Technology-Madras (IIT-M).

Growing up in Ernakulam, the child of engineers, he grew up fascinated by their sketches and calculations, and the idea that small, often invisible, changes could dramatically alter a much larger whole.

After his Master’s and his PhD, bio-inspired solutions became his mission, he says. What excites him most about the field of necrobotics is the ability to look at an ancient design with new eyes.

“Prior research has largely focused on bio-inspired or biomimetic systems, where researchers draw inspiration from natural designs and create engineered devices that mimic the form and function of living organisms. In this work, we go a step further,” he says. “As scientists, we often look to nature for inspiration on new ways to answer engineering and scientific questions. But complex natural designs, which have evolved through millions of years of evolution, can be difficult or impossible to replicate faithfully through artificial methods.”

In a world of giant leaps in technology, growing challenges (resource depletion, the climate emergency, demographic flux) and severe disparities in access, it’s time to rethink the formula of manufacturing everything from scratch, Rajappan adds, and instead simply look around and work with what is already available — and functioning perfectly — in one’s environment.

Technology then remains a driver. But Nature, just as it is, becomes the key resource for reinvention. It’s why the professor and his students were halted in their tracks by the dead spider in the first place.