VIDEO: Using Dead Spiders As Robot Hands

Necrobotics: repurposing dead spiders as tiny, creepy robotic grippers

Picture a dead spider with its eight legs curled inward. You’ve probably seen them. Now imagine a team of engineers at Rice University looking at this sad little corpse and thinking, “You know what? That’s not a dead bug — that’s a business opportunity.”

Welcome to the world of necrobotics, where the line between “spooky” and “science” gets blurred, and dead spiders get a second shot at life as tiny robot hands.

Yes, you read that right.

You may have heard the term biomimetics or biomimicry—the science of modeling robots after animals. Well, researchers at Rice figured, why mimic animals when you can just use them to build robots.

out how to .

Along came a spider gripper

Led by the delightfully pragmatic Daniel Preston and his grad student Faye Yap, their team is turning expired arachnids into mechanical grippers.

Their method? Stick a needle in the spider’s hydraulic chamber (the prosoma, for you anatomy nerds), puff some air in there, and watch those lifeless legs spring into action like a marionette at a haunted puppet show. The result is a gripper that can lift…