Where and how to find bio-inspiration? A comparison of search approaches for bio-inspired design

Biologicalisation calls for the integration of biological knowledge in manufacturing. Although biologists have been cataloguing biological knowledge for centuries, for the non-biologist finding this inspiration as input for bio-inspired design is a major challenge. In this paper, three different methods are used to find bio-inspiration for a case study on the clamping interface of a flexible mobile machining unit: the AskNature database, a natural language processing (NLP) approach, drawing on a large corpus of biological publications, and an informal consultation of an expert biologist as could be organised by a design office. The comparison of the retrieved principles with AskNature as a baseline indicates that the NLP approach allows retrieving publications about relevant biological strategies with a good recall performance, without involving an expert. However, extracting the working principles from the biological articles retrieved with the NLP approach is found to be error-prone and time consuming.