They create a robot that moves like an animal that extinct 400 million years ago

2023-11-08 22:45:25

Many organisms from the past lack current analogues that allow us to know how they moved or how they fed. This is the case of the pleurocystitidae, a group of echinoderms that became extinct during the Lower Paleozoic (400 million years ago).

Now, an international team of researchers, headed by Richard Desatnik from Carnegie Mellon University in the United States, and in which the Geological and Mining Institute of Spain (IGME), dependent on the Higher Council for Scientific Research (CSIC), has participated, has turned to robotics to understand the motor evolution of distant relatives of starfish and sea urchins.

“The echinoderm that we have studied was one of the first to start moving, probably to explore new resources, so evolutionarily it occupies a very important place in the history of this group of animals. However, it is nothing like any current organism, so it was vital to understand its biology using experimental techniques,” explains Samuel Zamora, an IGME researcher who participated in the study.

These techniques consist of interpreting the movements that an extinct animal made in the past by observing how a robotic replica developed in the present moves. Researchers have used computed tomography scans of a pleurocystitid fossil to generate a virtual 3D reconstruction that would result in a model similar to the extinct organism. “This model is the basis that engineers used to create the robot, which is an exact replica of the organism. From it, we interpret what the movements of the different parts would be like and we transmit all that information to the engineers so that they can place the actuators, that is, the devices in charge of generating the movement, in the appropriate places,” says the IGME researcher. -CSIC.

The result is a robot that moves very similar to how pleurocystitids did in the Paleozoic. This group of echinoderms took advantage of the strength of their tail to move along the sea floor in a single direction, forward. “We also showed that as their body length grew, these animals significantly increased their movement speed without incurring additional energy costs,” Zamora clarifies.

The pleurocystitida fossil. (Photo: Samuel Zamora / IGME / CSIC)

The robot developed by the researchers. (Photo: IGME / CSIC)

Paleobionics, a new science

This study has been possible thanks to a multidisciplinary strategy that has combined paleontological knowledge and robotic techniques. This has led researchers to name a new scientific discipline that uses both fields of knowledge to understand the biology of extinct organisms with the name “paleobionics”. “Today, thousands of robots in everyday use are based on biological designs. We want to use the large number of extinct forms, without current representation, to create new robots that address new challenges,” concludes Zamora.

Desatnik, Zamora and their colleagues present the technical details of their robotic simile of pleurocystitidae and what they discovered with it in the academic journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), under the title “Soft robotics reports how an early echinoderm moved” . (Source: Alejandro Parrilla García / CSIC)