Allometric scaling of insects and animals for biomimetic robot design considerations

Recently, biomimetic robots have received great attention as an alternative to overcome the limit of conventional robots. However, there is no standardized methodology to design and determine the specifications of biomimetic robots. In this paper, the concept of allometric scaling and its application to biomimetic robot design considerations are discussed. Also, characteristics of motion data of small insects and animals, which are eight species of crawling and eight species of flying creatures, all with less than 400 g in weight, are investigated. These are used to compare with those of recently presented biomimetic robots as a function of the body mass in several categories, including the velocity, angular velocity, acceleration, stride frequency, and wing beat frequency. The results show that the characteristics of most of the small biomimetic robots approximately fit in the allometric scaling of insects and animals. However, it is found that some small robots have characteristics which are quite different to those predictable from the allometric scaling law. Learning from nature may be a solution to design and determine the specifications of biomimetic robots, and the allometric scaling can be the one of the methods that can help define the achievable performance envelope.