Will Robots Evolve into Crabs?
From Embedded AI - Intelligence at the Deep Edge by David Such
March 26, 2026 · 19 min · Season 5 · Episode 21
About this episode
This episode explores the concept of carcinisation and its implications for both biological and artificial systems.
Send us Fan Mail Nature keeps reinventing the crab. At least five times, unrelated crustacean lineages have independently converged on the same compact, flat, modular body plan. Biologists call it carcinisation. Engineers should be paying attention. In this episode, we look at what the crab's repeated emergence tells us about the deep constraints that shape both biological and artificial systems. The crab body succeeds not because it is optimal in the abstract, but because its modularity crea...
People in this episode
Host: David Such
Topics covered
- evolution
- biological systems
- artificial systems
- modularity
- carcinisation
Keywords
- crab
- carcinisation
- evolution
- biological systems
- artificial systems
- modularity
- engineering
Mentioned in this episode
Organizations: Nature, biologists, engineers
Books & works: Will Robots Evolve into Crabs?
Places: crab, crustacean
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