Robots help understand how fish began to walk on land

Specialists in roboticspaleontologists and biologists are using robots to study how the ancestors of modern land animals went from swimming to walking, 390 million years ago.

In a paper published in the journal Science Robotics, the research team, led by the University of Cambridge, describes how “Paleolithic-inspired robotics” could provide a valuable experimental approach to studying how the pectoral and pelvic fins of ancient fish evolved. to support the weight on the ground.

“Because fossil evidence is limited, we have an incomplete picture of how ancient life transitioned to land,” lead author Dr. Michael Ishida of Cambridge’s Department of Engineering said in a statement. “Paleontologists examine ancient fossils for clues about the structure of the hip and pelvic joints, but there are limits to what we can learn from fossils alone. “That’s where robots can come into play, helping us fill gaps in research, particularly when we study important changes in how vertebrates moved.”

Ishida is a member of the Cambridge Bioinspired Robotics Laboratory, led by Professor Fumiya Iida. The team is developing energy-efficient robots for a variety of applications, which are inspired by the efficient ways animals and humans move.

With funding from the Human Frontier Science Program, the team is developing Paleolithic-inspired robots, partly inspired by modern-day “walking fish,” such as mudskippers, and by fossils of extinct fish. “In the lab, we can’t make a living fish walk differently, and we certainly can’t make a fossil move, so we’re using robots to simulate its anatomy and behavior,” Ishida said in a statement.

The team is creating robotic analogues of ancient fish skeletons, complete with mechanical joints that mimic muscles and ligaments. Once completed, the team will conduct experiments with these robots to determine how these ancient creatures might have moved.

“We want to know things like how much energy different walking patterns would have required, or what movements were most efficient,” Ishida said. “These data can help confirm or question existing theories about how these early animals evolved.”

One of the biggest challenges in this field is the lack of complete fossil records. Many of the ancient species from this period in Earth’s history are only known from partial skeletons, making it difficult to reconstruct their full range of movement.

LOOK: These are the first smartphones that will have Snapdragon 8 Elite, Qualcomm’s most advanced chip

“In some cases, we’re just guessing how certain bones connected or functioned,” Ishida said. “That’s why robots are so useful: they help us confirm these assumptions and provide new evidence to support or refute them.”

While robots are commonly used to study movement in living animals, very few research groups are using them to study extinct species. “There are only a few groups that do this kind of work,” Ishida said. “But we think it’s a natural fit: Robots can provide information about ancient animals that we simply can’t get from fossils or modern species alone.”

The team hopes their work will encourage other researchers to explore the potential of robotics to study the biomechanics of long-extinct animals. “We’re trying to close the loop between fossil evidence and real-world mechanics,” Ishida said. “Computer models are obviously incredibly important in this area of ​​research, but because robots interact with the real world, they can help us test theories about how these creatures moved, and perhaps even why they moved the way they did.” “They did it.”

The team is currently in the early stages of building their paleo-robots, but they hope to have some results within the next year. The researchers say they hope their robot models will not only deepen the understanding of evolutionary biology, but also could open new avenues of collaboration between engineers and researchers in other fields.