Scientists made a salamander robot

Salamander robot - Image 1To better understand the mechanism behind a salamander’s ability to swim and to crawl, scientists built a salamander robot.

The robot is nearly a yard long, and made up of 9 bright yellow plastic segments each containing a battery and a micro controller. It doesn’t much look like the slimy amphibian, but the robot has a primitive electric nervous system that scientists say mimics the change in motion from walking to swimming in salamanders.

The robot was made by a team led by Auke Jan Ijspeert of the Ecole Polytechnique Federale in Lausanne, Switzerland. The point of the project was to understand how a spinal cord developed to direct a swimming motion could handle the different coordination needed between a body and its limbs for walking. At first, they designed a basic nervous system modelled after a long, primitive, eel-like fish called lamprey.

They further modified the lamprey design, to be able to control even walking. The robot that they built can now walk, and even manages to swim. Its swimming motion uses undulations like the lamprey, while on land the robot uses a slow stepping gait with diagonally opposed limbs moving together while the body forms an S-shape.

The salamander robot is still far from the real robotic T-rexes we’d like to see built because they’re cool, but at least the project demonstrated how robots can be used to test biological models, and how biology can help in designing robot locomotion controllers.

Via CNN

Salamander robot - Image 1To better understand the mechanism behind a salamander’s ability to swim and to crawl, scientists built a salamander robot.

The robot is nearly a yard long, and made up of 9 bright yellow plastic segments each containing a battery and a micro controller. It doesn’t much look like the slimy amphibian, but the robot has a primitive electric nervous system that scientists say mimics the change in motion from walking to swimming in salamanders.

The robot was made by a team led by Auke Jan Ijspeert of the Ecole Polytechnique Federale in Lausanne, Switzerland. The point of the project was to understand how a spinal cord developed to direct a swimming motion could handle the different coordination needed between a body and its limbs for walking. At first, they designed a basic nervous system modelled after a long, primitive, eel-like fish called lamprey.

They further modified the lamprey design, to be able to control even walking. The robot that they built can now walk, and even manages to swim. Its swimming motion uses undulations like the lamprey, while on land the robot uses a slow stepping gait with diagonally opposed limbs moving together while the body forms an S-shape.

The salamander robot is still far from the real robotic T-rexes we’d like to see built because they’re cool, but at least the project demonstrated how robots can be used to test biological models, and how biology can help in designing robot locomotion controllers.

Via CNN

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