Published last week in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS), the research seeks to broaden modern perspectives of animal design and movement by introducing a new field of study known as Paleobionics. It is mainly aimed at using Softbotics - robotics with flexible electronics and soft materials - to understand the biomechanical factors that drove evolution using extinct organisms.
A team from Carnegie Mellon University in the United States led the project, collaborating with Poland's Przemysław Gorzelak of the Polish Academy of Sciences' Institute of Paleobiology, and the Geological and Mining Institute of Spain's Samuel Zamora.
"Many fundamental principles of biology and nature can only fully be explained if we look back at the evolutionary timeline of how animals evolved. We are building robot analogues to study how locomotion has changed" - said Carmel Majidi, lead author and a professor of mechanical engineering at Carnegie Mellon University, speaking for the educational institution's website.
With humans' time on earth representing only 0.007 percent of the planet's history, the modern-day animal kingdom that influences understanding of evolution and inspires today's mechanical systems is only a fraction of all creatures that have existed through history.
"Researchers in the bio-inspired robotics community need to pick and choose important features worth adopting from organisms," said co-first author Richard Desatnik.
Zach Patterson, a CMU alumnus and co-first author, said: "Essentially, we have to decide on good locomotion strategies to get our robots moving. For example, would a starfish robot really need to use 5 limbs for locomotion or can we find a better strategy?"
Now that the team has demonstrated that they can use Softbotics to engineer extinct organisms, they hope to explore other animals in the same way.
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Source: engineering.cmu.edu, PNAS, sciencedaily.com, iflscience.com