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Mimicking an Elephant Trunk
The extraordinary range of motions achieved by elephants’ trunks can be mimicked by a physical model that uses just three “muscles,” which could inspire robotic designs.
As the team’s mathematical model confirmed, this action requires a single contractile actuator running longitudinally on one side of a tapering trunk, like the bimetallic strips in the thermostats of electric kettles. Goriely and colleagues then tested their predictions experimentally with a “minimal trunk”: a cylinder of a rubbery material controlled by three actuator strips comprised of a liquid-crystal elastomer that contracts in one direction when heated. Mechanical engineer David Hu of the Georgia Institute of Technology calls the work “a triumph of mathematics and an important step in reverse engineering the elephant trunk.” He says that the important result is in “reducing the biological complexity to three degrees of freedom.” Biologist Michel Milinkovitch of the University of Geneva, who has studied the biomechanics of elephant trunks, says, “this minimal-design approach is very attractive,” although at this early stage it comes with limitations: the artificial trunk cannot be elongated or shortened, he says, and “it is unclear how it could efficiently handle small and large loads.”
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