SUMMARY

Nature has long served as a source of inspiration, or mimicry, for humans. By adapting mechanisms and capabilities from nature, scientific approaches have helped humans understand related phenomena and associated principles in order to engineer novel devices and improve their capability. Due to its infancy and scattered use, imitation of nature has followed a very ad hoc method. Although there are several sporadic examples of how biomimicry has been used in design, there is a need for a systematic method for the transfer of these natural technologies. In this research, we develop a systematic method for reverse engineering biological systems. Specifically, we wish to answer the following question: "How can advanced, engineering systems be systematically designed based on biological systems?". The proposed method can be divided into three key areas of research: Architectural Decomposition, Behavioral Modeling, and Functional Abstraction. This method will be demonstrated using two examples: (1) the design and fabrication of a variable-stiffness material based on the mutable connective tissue (MCT) of the sea cucumber and (2) preliminary design of an artificial kidney.