Design Ideation for Autonomous Reproductive Worm Robot: Inheritance from Biological Worm C.elegans

Abstract

The vast domain of Bio-inspired Robotics has been nourished with several key-themes of design over the years and those are, no doubt conceptually brilliant. The size effect of such bio-robotic gadgets was also tackled through modern-age manufacturing as well as assembly technologies and we have got experimental gadgets like worm robots as outcome. However, in all such prototypes of miniature bio-robots and/or worm robots, the essence of biological science has been missing to date. The concept of bio-inspired team robots having near-identical features, symbolizing biological off-springs was not explored hitherto. We are attempting to provide a novel autonomous assistive robotic system having ‘Mother’ and ‘Daughter(s)’ for use in agricultural fields. Our design has been nucleated from a famous biological worm, namely, Caenorhabditis elegans (C.elegans) which has a fully-developed reproductive system, notwithstanding its length (~ 1 mm.) or even the diameter (~ 50 microns). In this paper, we will report the technological ideation design of a representative ‘Mother-Daughter’ Worm Robotic system by naturally inheriting the reproductive mechanism of the biological C.elegans worm (barring the size effect).