When the air was sucked back out through the needle, the legs returned to their naturally curled-up position. When they blew air into the chamber through the needle, the air flow activated the hydraulic system just as a spider's flowing blood would, forcing the legs to straighten. The team inserted a needle into the prosoma of a dried-out spider corpse and superglued it in place. To transform the wolf spiders into necrobots, the researchers recreated the arachnid hydraulic system, substituting air for blood. "When they die, they lose the ability to actively pressurize their bodies," lead study author Faye Yap, a doctoral candidate in mechanical engineering at Rice University, said in the statement. (Image credit: Preston Innovation Laboratory/Rice University) (opens in new tab) The wolf spiders leg joint is close by a single flexor muscle and opened using hydraulic pressure. This means the necrobots could pick up a wide variety of objects, including delicate electrical components, irregularly shaped meshes and, yes, dead wolf spiders, the researchers explained in a new study. Wolf spiders - a group that comprises nearly 2,400 species in the Lycosidae family - can carry objects much larger than themselves and have tiny hairs on their legs that give them extra grip. The team then realized that they could reverse engineer this hydraulic system to hijack the spider's corpse and give it a second life as a machine.īy puffing air into wolf spider cadavers, the team found that all eight legs could be simultaneously straightened out and curled up again to create a grabbing motion that could then be used to lift up objects. After looking up why the legs of dead spiders always seem to end up pulled tightly toward their abdomens, the scientists learned that spider joints were controlled through a hydraulic pressure system that fails when the arachnids die.
The idea for the mechanized arachnid grippers, or "necrobots," first came about when researchers noticed a dead spider curled up in a ball in a corner of their engineering lab.
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