Nature has evolved for millions of years and came up with a wide variety of non-conventional solutions to overcome different challenges faced by animals, fungi, and plants. Knowledge on these non-conventional mechanical approaches in nature can lead to more creativity in mechanical design and to better (simpler, smaller, more robust) solutions than with conventional technology. Especially if we look at relatively small animals, we see that they have come up with ingenious solutions to overcome constraints put on them by their small size or size of their body parts. A very interesting small animal is the parasitic wasp.The parasitic wasp has a long and slender ovipositor (egg-laying tube) which it uses to deposit eggs in wood, fruit, or other animals. Based on the length and diameter of this ovipositor, it should be technically impossible to penetrate wood. In order to achieve this incredible feat, the parasitic wasp makes smart use of a variety of mechanisms to prevent buckling and initiate egg transport through its ovipositor. The most prominent mechanism is a reciprocating motion of the valves of the ovipositor.&nbsp;This reciprocating motion results in a friction differential between the valves and their direct environment, allowing for egg transport and low push force penetration.In this talk I will discuss how this small wasp inspired us to design new types of ultrathin (0.4 mm) self-propelling needles (designed&nbsp;by Marta Scali)&nbsp;and transport mechanisms and how we translated the wasp’s mechanism into different mechanical solutions. These mechanical solutions allow for&nbsp;smaller, more flexible, and longer instrument designs that fill the growing demand of minimally invasive surgeries in the near future.

How a Small Wasp Inspired New Developments in Medical Instrument Design

Paper Proceedings: https://asmedigitalcollection.asme.org/SMASIS/SMASIS2021/volume/85499

ASME 2021 Smart Materials, Adaptive Structures and Intelligent Systems (SMASIS2021)

Supporting the need among researchers worldwide for additional online and multimedia content, ASME now offers the ASME Conference Video Collection. This platform will collect and provide long-term access to conference presentation videos, encompassing all technology areas within ASME's technical conference and events program. About 30,000-40,000 engineers across all mechanical engineering and related disciplines participate in ASME conferences each year. This includes authors of approximately 6,000 to 8,000 technical papers published by ASME, the majority of whom also submit video presentations for our virtual conferences. The video collection will be available as an add-on to existing product packages or as a separate subscription.