By Perla Freoa, Staff Writer
During my stay in Israel this summer, I attended the 36th Israeli Conference on Mechanical Engineering (ICME), a gathering of researchers, engineers and students exploring the latest developments across the field of mechanical engineering. Initially, the program seemed highly promising, keeping me eager to discover cutting-edge human engineering. Looking at the schedule, I made my way to the sector where the robotics presentations were taking place. The most interesting robots I was introduced to were presented by various universities; each robot had a different purpose, but they all had one thing in common: the exhibition of natural and animal-like characteristics.
If some of our most advanced engineers are looking to nature for solutions, what does that tell us about the engineering present in nature itself?
The ICME, hosted by the Technion in Haifa, took place on July 13, 2026. The theme of the conference was “Mechanical Engineering in the Era of AI.” Researchers and students from universities all around Israel (such as Ben-Gurion University, Afeka Academic College of Engineering, and Azrieli College of Engineering) attended alongside prominent industries such as the Nuclear Research Center (NRCN) and Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI).
Lunch was served in the mechanical engineering campus courtyard, where PhD and Master’s researchers proudly posed next to their posters. At around 11 AM, everyone made their way to their respective buildings to attend the first sessions of the day. The program encompassed many different areas, from Robotics & AI and fluid mechanics to thermodynamics, tribology and propulsion.
I found myself standing in front of Room 433, where “Robot Mechanics & Dynamics I” was being held. During this hour-and-a-half session, different robots were presented to us: One explored a new way of joining joints using magnets, another mimicked a marine animal to achieve locomotion and the last presentation of the session had a clear pattern: using the behavior of insects and animals to optimize movement. This is when I realized it was no mere coincidence that nature was at the core of these new robots. Engineers call this approach bio-inspired design: instead of inventing a solution entirely from scratch, they study how living organisms have already solved similar mechanical problems.
For example, the eel becomes an unexpected engineering teacher when studying natural aquatic environments. One challenge here is finding a way to move through the aquatic environment without disturbing the very ecosystem researchers are trying to observe. A robot entering a pond or lake needs to be able to move through the water, reach different areas, and potentially monitor its surroundings while avoiding unnecessary disturbance to the animals and environment. Presented by Nisim Kachlon from Ben Gurion University, the amphibious robot was inspired by anguilliform swimming, the wave-like locomotion used by eel-shaped animals. Instead of relying on several motors to independently move different parts of its body, the robot uses a continuous traveling-wave mechanism driven by a single actuator. This produces smooth undulations along its body, allowing the robot to propel itself through water while keeping its mechanical design relatively simple. During experiments in a natural lake, the researchers observed the robot interacting with fish while producing minimal environmental disturbance.
But what happens when a terrain becomes too difficult for a conventional robot? Thick grass can trap wheels, uneven ground can make a robot unstable, steep obstacles can be difficult to navigate, and narrow passages can bring a machine to a stop. This was the challenge addressed by the Decoupled STAR (DSTAR), an asymmetric robot designed to adapt its shape and movement to its surroundings. Its asymmetry is not a flaw but actually one of its greatest advantages: By changing the positions of its wheel axes and shifting its center of mass, the robot can reconfigure itself to crawl, roll, and maneuver across difficult terrain. Its design allows it to roll sideways over vertical obstacles as high as 20 centimeters and cross gaps up to 18 centimeters wide.
What made the presentation particularly fascinating was the variety of movements the robot could perform. When conventional wheels are no longer effective, such as in loose soil, rocky terrain, or thick grass, the robot can switch to specialized “whegs” or use what the researchers call a “Turtle Gait,” allowing it to advance and turn without relying on its wheels. During the presentation, David Zarrouk from Ben-Gurion University explained that by observing how cockroaches adjust their bodies while navigating difficult terrain, his laboratory developed an initial approach to reproducing this adaptability mechanically. The resulting movement allows the robot to repeatedly adjust its body up and down as it encounters obstacles, helping it navigate steep steps and highly uneven surfaces.
This is what makes bio-inspired robotics so fascinating. Engineers are not necessarily trying to reproduce an animal exactly; instead, they identify a useful principle in the animal’s movement and translate that principle into a mechanical system. DSTAR does not need to become a cockroach or a turtle; it needs to understand, mechanically, what makes those animals so difficult to stop. Rather than designing one rigid machine for one specific environment, the goal is to create a robot that can change its movement when its environment changes.
DSTAR’s adaptability could eventually give such robots a purpose far beyond the laboratory, allowing them to navigate dangerous environments for tasks such as environmental monitoring, search and rescue, infrastructure inspection, and exploration, potentially alerting humans to danger or assisting with first aid in the future. The goal is to build machines that can adapt to the environment instead of forcing the environment to adapt to the machine.
The age of artificial intelligence (AI) may therefore produce an unexpected relationship between artificial and natural intelligence. The more powerful our computational tools become, the better we may become at understanding and reproducing solutions that nature has already discovered.
My experience at the conference became more than an engineering lesson. As I watched researchers use sophisticated mathematics, simulations, AI, and robotics to reproduce biological mechanisms, I found myself thinking about the source of the original designs.
A scientist might see these systems as products of evolution, and a person of faith might see them as evidence of divine design. Even if this insight can be internalized differently depending on the person’s background, the point is that engineering processes are a great source of humility. Humans repeatedly discover that nature has already solved problems we’re still learning to understand.
I went to the conference expecting to see engineers inventing the future. Instead, I found myself looking at engineers studying the past, or rather, studying something that has been working long before humans began building machines. AI, robotics, and advanced manufacturing may allow us to create increasingly sophisticated machines, but nature remains an extraordinary source of engineering solutions. Perhaps that is the most humbling lesson of all: Sometimes the most innovative thing an engineer can do is to stop trying to invent a solution and start by asking how nature solved the problem.
And if one chooses to see nature as the work of the Creator, perhaps the best engineer at the conference was the one who wasn’t mentioned in the pamphlet.
Photo Credit: Unsplash