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Using Robotics to Better Understand Ancient Species

Watch this video to see a Carnegie Mellon-led team develop a soft robot to better understand an ancient organism — the pleurocystitid — that existed 450 million years ago. As old to the dinosaurs as the dinosaurs are to us, it’s the first organism that used a muscular stem to push itself forward.

“Our goal is to use Softbotics to bring biological systems back to life, in the sense that we can mimic them to understand how they operated,” said Phil LeDuc  , professor of mechanical engineering.

Topics:
Automation Robotics

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    Transcript

    00:00:08 Carmel: So this project was a collaboration between my group and Phil LeDuc’s lab at Carnegie Mellon. We also worked with a pair of paleontologists based out of Europe. And what we did was develop a soft robot to understand the locomotion and mechanics of an ancient organism that existed 450 million years ago. This organism was called the pleurocystitid. It’s as old to the dinosaurs as the dinosaurs are to us, and it plays a really critical role in the evolution of marine organisms. It’s the first organism that used a muscular stem to push itself forward. So using the fossil record and working with the paleontologists, we developed a design

    00:00:52 for the body plan of this robot and designed a robot that mimicked a lot of the properties and the features, the morphology, the anatomy of the pleurocystitid. Phil: And so this entire thing is really about evolution, right? This is the evolution of these organisms as they started to get these muscular stems and then they started to move. I couldn’t have done this without Carmel because while I can play with robots, I certainly cannot design the kind of actuation systems that do a great job of mimicking the way these robots work. And so for me, the learning about evolution really changes a lot of the way people think about history.

    00:01:30 At least, I hope it does. Carmel: Right, and evolution also does a lot to inform how we build robots. I mean, when we think about a lot of the biologically inspired robots that engineers are developing today, I mean, one of the big goals is to mimic the incredible versatility and multifunctionality of natural organisms, right? I mean, we want robots to do so much more than just work in a factory, right, or just do certain kind of highly controlled, you know, precision tasks. I mean, more and more, we want robots in unstructured environments. We want robots in places that, say, may be might be hard to reach for humans, right? And so these are all cases where we really do want to build robots that better mimic

    00:02:12 natural organisms. And what better way to do that than to really deeply understand the underlying principles of how animals move. Phil: So Carmel and I, when we did this, we’re like, maybe one way to do this is to go back into the world of fossils, right, where you can learn a lot about creatures that don’t exist, but you can rebuild them because you know their structure from the fossils themselves, which is obviously quite broadly applicable. The field is called...what do we call the field now? Carmel: Well, now, we call it paleobionics, right? But I mean, if you actually look back, I mean, there’s a really rich history in robotics,

    00:02:48 and particularly biologically inspired robots. So using tools in robotics to understand systems and biology, organisms, how they move. Phil: So this is a very Carnegie Mellon project, right? You take someone like me who’s very interested in biology and medicine and looking at cell and molecular mechanics and start working with Carmel, who’s a world expert inside of soft materials and the robotics domain, and we’re both mechanical engineers but then you add in these two great students, Richard and Zach, and then you reach out and we found these fantastic paleontologists. And when you get that all together it’s a very CMU thing. It turns into allowing us to look backwards in history in a way that people haven’t used before, using fossilized

    00:03:38 records and soft robotics. Carmel: Yeah, and this really also shows where softbotics can make an impact. I mean, we’re kind of now seeing the glimpses of, you know, this new paradigm, this new approach to building machines and the robotic systems. What new discoveries it can help unlock, you know, things that just weren’t possible with kind of more conventional robotic systems and, you know, more traditional approaches to these different materials and hardware architectures. So, you know, what kind of inspires me is that this kind of represents just one of the many ways that, you know, these approaches in softbotics, you know, can help, you know, not just engineers and people interested in building better robots, but it can also help

    00:04:15 biologists, paleontologists, and people also better understand our world.