The IEEE Computer Society's magazine, Computer, has a nice overview of robots that take design or engineering cues from nature.
Mark Cutkosky, a professor in Stanford University's Department of Mechanical Engineering, is part of a team working on a family of legged robots based on cockroach locomotion. He says their team defines biomimetics as "extracting principles from biology and applying them to man-made devices—particularly robots."
Cutkosky says two forces are driving the "new wave" of robotics. First, biological research has exposed a huge amount of biological process data that roboticists can apply to their work. Second, advances in low-cost, power-efficient computing systems allow researchers to create robots that work outside laboratories. Cutkosky says that roboticists can "really put some of the lessons we're learning from biology to practice. Ten years ago, even if I had understood exactly what materials and mechanical principles underlie the cockroach's robust dynamic locomotion, I would have been unable to build a robot that embodied them."
