Speaking of robot dinosaurs…researchers at Carnegie Mellon use the word "Paleobionics" [2]. (I dunno if they coined the word themselves, but I haven't seen it before, so it's not widely used.)
The CMU group has been developing soft robotics, which they argue is particularly well suited to the exploration of "the biomechanics of extinct organisms using robotics" ([2], p. 2).
This fall they report on studies of the bodies and locomotion of pleurocystitids, which is related to modern starfish and lived 450 million years ago.
These organisms are some of the earliest to move by wriggling their stem (i.e., tail). Like the wriggling of a snake, this style of locomotion is actually not all that obvious. The study identified alternative "gaits", which could be simulated by different robot versions.
Examining these organisms raises questions about their evolutionary history, and how later organisms evolved. Robot models, "paleobionics", tries to bring the organism "back to life", imagining how it actually moved. It is also possible to play around with evolution, to explore, for instance, the effect of a longer stem.
Visual inspection of the fossils has produced a variety of hypotheses about how the organism moved, and how the stem contributed. The combination of in silico simulations and robot prototypes identified the most likely gaits used in the real animal. As might be expected, the body plan of the natural animals is close to mechanically optimal according to simulation studies.
While the study offers some solid conclusions about how the ancient organisms moved, although many details cannot be guessed from the fossils and robots alone. For example, it is not clear how the front limbs (brachioles) contributed to locomotion, if at all. They probably did use them, but we don't know how.
As in biomimetic studies in general, understanding the principles of how animal bodies work can inform the design of robots. Paleobionics deepens the study, trying to understand how animal bodies evolved, potentially revealing insights about alternative designs and solutions to specific challenges.
Very interesting, even if it's not a pet T. rex.
- Amal Jos Chacko, This robot mimics a 450-million-year-old extinct marine organism, in Interesting Engineering, November 7, 2023. https://interestingengineering.com/innovation/this-robot-mimics-450-mililon-year-old-extinct-marine-organism
- Richard Desatnik, Zach J. Patterson, Przemysław Gorzelak, Samuel Zamora, Philip LeDuc, and Carmel Majidi, Soft robotics informs how an early echinoderm moved. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 120 (46):e2306580120, 2023/11/14 2023. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2306580120
- Kaitlyn Landram, 450-million-year-old organism finds new life in Softbotics, in College of Engineering, Carnegie Mellon University - News, November 6, 2023. https://engineering.cmu.edu/news-events/news/2023/11/06-paleobionics.html
PS. Some obivous names for a band
Brachioles
Paleobionics (or, I guess, "Neobionics")
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