MIE.02 – Replicating the Function and Speed of a Chameleon’s Tongue

• Gregory Dachowski
• Baneza Hernandez
• Mohammad Ibrahim
• Zach Williams

A chameleon’s tongue is extremely rapid, stretchable, and compact. With those characteristics they have developed a specialized feeding system based on ballistic projection. When analyzing the kinematics of a chameleon’s tongue it is observed that the tongue can accelerate from 0 m/s to 60 m/s in 0.1 seconds. Humans have yet to recreate the ballistic nature of the chameleon’s tongue, in this project our goal is to replicate the speed and recoil that is generally observed when studying chameleons. By creating a mechanism to replicate the function and speed of a chameleon’s tongue we can later apply this theory to industry machinery in manufacturing. From the codes and standards of industry applications, we narrowed our design requirements to specifically use spring forces to shoot a gripper out and a motor to bring the gripper back to the firing position. Constructing a mechanism that can shoot out and recoil with adequate speed can have potential application uses in manufacturing processes. An alternative design that was considered used a motor to engage a forward feeder and a clutch that would retract a tapeline to retrieve an object, similar to a tape measure, as a group we decided this idea would not demonstrate the variable trajectory of a chameleon’s tongue. Our current design has three main components: spring body, spring, and projectile. The spring is hidden inside the body and will shoot out to then recoil back using an electronic actuator. A 3D prototype was printed to test the mechanism’s launch and recoil which was redesigned to add a mechanical trigger to help with simplistic testing. Our sponsor requested that we continuously improve our design to achieve similar results to the natural movement of a chameleon’s tongue. With that in mind our finial design achieves a speed close to the outlined velocity with the capability of achieving those speeds with a material and compression change. The recoil system brings the projectile back to the launching position but not to a reloaded position. By fulling our requirements, the idea can potentially be used by manufacturing companies for a variety of purposes on assembly lines, conveyer belts, or in rejection systems.