Biomimetics as a Functional Engineering Framework for Mechanical Systems: A PRISMA-Guided Systematic Mapping of Sensing, Inspection, Access Robotics, and Condition Monitoring (2016-2026).

Mechanical engineering systems must sense, inspect, and navigate constrained environments and operate adaptively under uncertainty-requirements that map structurally onto capabilities achieved by biological systems through distributed sensing, morphology-driven locomotion, multimodal perception, and decentralised control. Biomimetics can therefore be interpreted not merely as a source of design inspiration but also as a functional engineering framework relevant to industrial monitoring, inspection, maintenance, and autonomous operation. This study presents a PRISMA 2020-guided systematic mapping review of the biomimetics literature explicitly relevant to mechanical-engineering functions over the decade 2016-2026. A Scopus corpus of 11,114 records was screened through a two-stage abstract-level process. After deduplication and broad relevance filtering, a stricter eligibility audit retained 505 studies assignable to five predefined functional clusters: robotics and access (235 records; 46.5%), mechanical surfaces and tribology (141; 27.9%), sensing and monitoring (106; 21.0%), vision and inspection (14; 2.8%), and control and computation (9; 1.8%). Publication output accelerated markedly after 2022, with 2025 yielding the highest annual count. The principal gap identified is not a shortage of biomimetic concepts, but their limited consolidation into deployable industrial inspection and maintenance architectures. A translational taxonomy connecting biological principles, engineering abstractions, enabling technologies, and mechanical use cases is proposed as an interpretive structuring tool for future research prioritisation and technology-readiness discussion.