'OroBOT' Robot: Recreating the Walk of 300-Million-Year-Old, Extinct Animal

Using the fossilized skeleton and footprints of a 300-million-year-old animal called Orobates pabsti, researchers from EPFL  and Berlin have developed a method for identifying the most likely gaits of extinct animals - and designed a robot that can recreate their walk. Orobates was a vertebrate that fell somewhere between amphibians and mammals. The researchers developed a digital model of its skeleton based on the fossil and the biomechanics of modern animals with sprawling postures, carried out a kinematic computer simulation of Orobates’ gait as it walked on its digitalized footprints, and used the fossilized animal anatomy to build a robot called 'OroBOT.'

Transcript

00:00:02 so here we are a very exciting project where paleontologist approaches to ask us hey we have this fossil of very old animal the aura baptists and we have the photocell and we also have footprints of that animal and the big question was to see what was the most likely gait way of moving of that very old animal and there it was very interesting for us to make a robot and a complete simulation of the

00:00:24 the morphology and very systematically explore all possible gates all possible ways of moving in these footprints first with our collaborators in humble University of Berlin they create an animation which is a kinematic model of the fossil and with that animation we understood which are the three main characteristics of a spreading the locomotion in this case we have for

00:00:47 example how close we are to the ground or how erect we are second is how much you bend the spine when you move and the third one is how much you use this joint or how much you use this joint to validate the kinematic model we use modern species as skink a salamander and Juana and a caiman and what we did was take x-rays of these animals where they were

00:01:10 walking and with this we create a set of data that allow us to basically validate that this space makes sense then the second part watch the dynamics part which is the things that we did with robotics and is created as robot and out of this role we create a simulation in order to test all these physics so basically we recreate a certain kind amount of gait in that space and with

00:01:35 those gates we test it which these gates behave under for matrix the fourth sign that we will recreate in the pro robot is it's a very important animal in evolution from that animal the reptiles the birds and mammals including us come from