This paper reviews research on biologically inspired design, and has three main parts. The first part surveys examples relevant to three groupings of manufacturing research. The second part presents general methods that support biomimetic design, including different approaches for the steps involved in identifying and applying relevant biological analogies for any given problem. The third part details examples that illustrate the use of a general biomimetic design method, which identifies analogies from natural-language biological information. Finally, insights and conclusions are drawn and synthesized.

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