Forget human ingenuity - the best source of ideas for cutting-edge technology might be in the natural world.

Humans like to think we're pretty good at design and technology - but we often forget that Mother Nature had a head start of 3.6 billion years. Now the burgeoning science of biomimicry, which reverse-engineers clever ideas from the natural world, is exploiting the way geckoes climb walls or hummingbirds hover.

Such efforts have been employed for years. Joseph Paxton's designs for the Crystal Palace, home of London's Great Exhibition of 1851, were based in part on his observations of the structure of giant water lilies.

George de Mestral, a Swiss engineer, came up with the concept of Velcro after observing the way burdock seeds clung to his clothes and the fur of his dog.

Yet as we become more concerned about the environmental impact of our behavior, biomimicry is becoming fashionable.

"Imitating natural systems is about trying to mimic the amazing effectiveness of ecosystems, where the waste from one system or animal is used as the nutrients for another," says Michael Pawlyn, the director of a sustainable architecture firm. "Often, by applying ideas from ecosystems you can turn problems into solutions that are better both environmentally and commercially."

Suppose you want to clean a building cheaply. Scientists noticed lotus plants are self-cleaning - they grow in muddy environments yet remain pristine. Researchers found tiny ridges and bumps on the leaves that stop water from spreading across the surface; instead, droplets slide away, carrying dirt with them. Result: self-cleaning solar panels and paint. The paint retains tiny bumps in its surface when it dries, copying the lotus.

There are plenty of examples of biomimicry from across the world, including:

Fin-powered turbines

Dr Frank Fish, an expert on how animals move, based at the University of West Chesterfield in Pennsylvania, was looking at a sculpture of a humpback whale, when he realized the artist had put bumps on the whale's flippers. That made no sense: everyone knew that the leading edge of a wing had to be smooth and streamlined.

The gallery owner, however, assured him the bumps were in the right place. Intrigued, the doctor made a thorough investigation. He discovered the mysterious bumps were precisely the right shape and in precisely the right places, to make even an animal as cumbersome as a whale extremely agile, as the bumps produce vortices that generate more lift and reduce drag.

Dr Fish has set up a firm called Whale Power, which uses this concept - which he refers to as "tubercle technology" - to design wind turbines, pumps and fans. The bumpy blades, he says, are quieter and more reliable and produce 20 per cent more power a year.

See like a bee Nissan's goal of halving the number of deaths or serious injuries involving its vehicles between 1995 and 2015 seemed an ambitious task. But the company had a secret weapon: the bumblebee.

The Japanese firm has unveiled a new micro robotic car, the BR23C, which avoids collisions by using sensors based on the creatures' compound eyes. With a field of vision of more than 300 degrees, bees fly uninterrupted inside their personal space and dodge obstacles.

To recreate the function of a compound eye, engineers at Nissan came up with the idea of a Laser Range Finder.

The LRF detects obstacles up to two meters away within a 180-degree radius in front of the car, calculates the distance and sends a signal to an on-board microprocessor to help the driver to avoid a collision.

"The split-second it detects an obstacle, the robot will mimic the movements of a bee and instantly change direction by turning its wheels at right angles or greater to avoid a collision," says Toshiyuki Andou, manager of Nissan's mobility laboratory and principal engineer on the project. The firm plans to incorporate the system into manually driven cars.

Dine at the wormery

One of Pawlyn's more ambitious plans - for which he is still trying to find funding - is the Community Ecology Center, in which the building's external form and internal function mimic the natural world.

"We wanted to create a celebratory form of architecture which is commercially viable, links energy production and water purification, and acts as a social hub," he says.

At the heart of the center is a greenhouse, with tropical fruit and vegetables grown near the ceiling, where it's hotter.

The produce will be served in a restaurant; the waste food will feed a wormery; the worms will be fed to tilapia, a type of fish; and the tilapia will be served to the diners. Any rubbish will be processed by an anaerobic digester, a kind of processor in which micro-organisms break down the waste in an oxygen-free environment, producing bio-gas to heat the greenhouse and provide electricity.

Meanwhile, a "living machine", designed to mimic the filtration process that occurs in natural wetlands, will turn the sewage into clean water.

Giant leap for robot kind

Their names may sound like a collection of children's toys but the latest robots funded by the Pentagon's Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency, or Darpa, are anything but playthings. The six-legged devices developed by the RiSE project, which is presided over by Professor Mark Cutkosky of Stanford University, are biologically inspired, based on insects and reptiles.

The aim is to develop machines capable of walking both along the ground and up walls and other surfaces. "Stickybot" looks and climbs exactly like a gecko, using friction to adhere to smooth surfaces; while "DynoClimber" scuttles up walls like a cockroach, at speeds of 66cm (or 1.5 times its body length) every second.

Researchers at Bath University are also working on robots that copy insects, in this case by jumping. Lacking muscles, insects have to rely on unleashing small amounts of energy, like flattening and releasing a spring. Using a similar system, the "Jollbot" can leap 50cm into the air.

The robot's creator, Rhodri Armour, hopes that an advanced version will be able to bound over the Martian surface, in areas where NASA's Mars Rover is too ungainly to tread.

Strong mussels

Australian scientists also turn to nature for inspiration. Dean Cameron was reading a bedtime story to his son about animals when he had an epiphany.

He'd been working on a way to join plastic waste-water tanks together that would allow them to be transported in separate pieces, potentially saving his company hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. What caught his eye was a picture of a mussel.

"They have an intriguing mechanism for holding onto rocks, or another substrate," Cameron says. The picture showed how the mussel extended many flexible threads of protein into small cracks in rocks giving it a tenacious hold.

Seeing the way mussels and clams held onto rocks in "life or death situations" gave Cameron the spur he needed to proceed with the design of his Joinlox invention - a fastening system that joins two overlapping, crenellated surfaces with a flexible strip of plastic.

"You're not going to improve on processes that have been under the evolutionary spotlight for a long time," he said.

Just like the flexible threads used by the mussel, the plastic strip bends to absorb forces imposed on the joint, making the join remarkably strong.

This mollusc-inspired invention won Cameron the 2008 Invention of the Year award on the ABC show The New Inventors.

The mechanism was described as "Velcro for the manufacturing industry" and has wide-reaching applications in many areas, as it allows the creation of a strong join with no special materials or technique.

From the whale's mouthYuri Obst, an Australian engineer, has developed a self-cleaning filter inspired by baleen whales. When designing filters, he realized that typically the same problem came up - how to deal with difficult constituents in water. The solution was not to focus on the liquids, as most self-cleaning filters do, but to focus on the particles "the same way the baleen whale collects and strains its food".

Whales, like the humpbacks commonly seen off the coast of Sydney, have keratinised plates at the front of their mouth, called baleen. They're able to feed by filtering water though the baleen, combined with a sweeping action of their tongue to clean the baleen.

At the University of South Australia in 1999, Obst made a filter that uses a mechanical imitation of the whale tongue, and the reversing flow of water when whales dive and surface to feed.

"Other self-cleaning filters focus on pushing water through the filter until it becomes blocked, then shut down to clear the blockage," Obsp said.

"We said, 'Let's focus on the material that's collecting rather than the water, which is effectively what the whale's doing. Whales don't care about the water, just the food."'

How kelp helped

Tim Finnigan was looking for a new way to convert the kinetic energy from ocean waves into electrical energy. Conventional means of doing so were prone to damage from the strong currents involved.

Then, on a very windy day, "I was looking at trees bending over," Finnigan says. This gave him the idea to design bioWAVE, a sustainable energy system based on the shape and motion of sea plants and weed such as kelp.

"Sea plants have evolved a way to move and bend with the flow," he says. The flexible, plant-based design allows a lighter and more efficient means of harvesting wave energy, as the blades can lie prone to avoid damage during extreme wave conditions.

Finnigan, the chief executive of BioPower Systems at the Australian Technology Park in Redfern, also designed a system for harvesting energy from streams, again inspired by the natural world.

The bioSTREAM system takes its design from "the efficiency of certain swimming species, such as sharks or tuna," Finnigan said.

A single fin is fixed in place but can oscillate to produce energy with changes in current. The system can also assume a streamlined profile, again allowing it to avoid damage from excessively strong currents.

Water-saving beetles

The long-term supply of fresh water is one of the biggest issues facing Australia today. However, imagine if your daily water needs could be met by putting up a large sail-like structure every evening. That's the idea proposed by Andrew Harris, associate professor of chemical engineering at the University of Sydney.

Stenocara beetles, from the Namib Desert in Africa, have a shell that allows them to collect water from the air. Water-attracting ridges and water-repellent troughs on the surface of the shell collect moisture from the air and channel it into the beetle's mouth.

Harris's team plans to use the beetle's shell as a model for a water-collecting device for residential homes. They will use a combination of polymer chemistry and inkjet printers to produce and test different surfaces on a large scale.

Harris said the great strength of biomimicry, or what he called "industrial ecology", is that "the problems we're trying to solve today have already been solved. Mother Nature is very clever".