Due to technological improvements made during the last decade, bipedal robots today present a surprisingly high level of humanoid skill. Autonomy, with respect to the processing of information, is realized to a relatively high degree. What is mainly lacking in robotics, moving from purely anthropomorphic robots to 'anthropofunctional' machines, is energetic autonomy. In a previously published analysis, we showed that closer attention to the functional morphology of human walking could give robotic engineers the experiences of an at least 6 Myr beta test period on minimization of power requirements for biped locomotion.
A modular BioMEMS platform for tissue engineering is presented. The smart combination of silicon, glass and polymers offers microenvironments with properties applicable to cultivation, observation and manipulation of cells. The implementation of the so-called ‘black silicon’ as a nanostructured surface allows easy mounting and assembly with standard polymer tubing and connectors only needing an extremely small additional volume as well as the smart integration of polymer scaffold structures. Parallelization of the modular structures enables high throughput screenings and observations. Complex biomedical experiments for tissue engineering as well as water analytics can be established by cascading several modules.
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