Engineering Translation of Biological Hydrostatic Skeleton Principles: A Design Framework for Large-Scale Hydraulic Structures

Biological hydrostatic skeletons use pressurized fluid compartments constrained by tension-resistant membranes to provide structural support in soft-bodied invertebrates. Evolution has optimized these systems over 500 million years. While soft robotics has successfully applied hydrostatic principles at the centimeter scale, their translation to large-scale civil infrastructure remains largely unexplored. This paper presents a biomimetic design framework for adapting hydrostatic principles to engineering applications ranging from flood barriers to water storage.We identify four convergent biological design rules extracted from earthworms, jellyfish, and sea anemones: (1) segmented compartmentalization for…