A robotic Tyrannosaurus rex might look best in a Jurassic horror movie, but researchers say machines based on extinct animals could help shed light on evolution.
Scientists say the emerging field of “paleo-inspired robotics” can bring fossils to life and help researchers explore how changes in anatomy have affected the way animals move, their speed and how much energy they use.
Dr Michael Ishida, from the University of Cambridge and a co-author of the review article, said: “We have these animals that evolution has created over millions and millions of years, but with a few lines of code or a new 3D pressed bone we can simulate those millions of years of evolution in a single day of engineering effort.”
As an example, Ishida noted that he is part of a team working on how certain species of fish, such as mudskippers, evolved the ability to “walk” on land.
“Build a robot [based on these living species of fish] will hopefully give us some insight into what kind of evolutionary pressure, or what kind of mechanics, began to force fish to develop these different anatomies that would be useful on land,” he said, adding that such learning would help the team developed paleo-inspired robots from extinct fish.
Writing in the journal Science RoboticsIshida and colleagues note that engineers have long created robots to mimic living animals, while robots have also been built to explore specific features of extinct creatures, including plesiosaurs.
The team hopes that researchers will now move to recreate the entire body of ancient animals. “Analyzing just one leg is not enough to really understand how a four-legged animal walked,” Ishida said.
He said such robots have an advantage over computer simulations. For example, when studying the way a creature moved, robots can be placed in real environments, while computer simulations require complex models that capture the physics of surfaces such as sand or sticky mud.
Among the questions the team says paleo-inspired robotics can help answer are how vertebrates shifted from living in aquatic environments to living on land, how flight evolved and how certain animals went from walking on four legs to walking on two .
“To understand these big changes [is] not something you can easily do just by looking at fossilized remains,” Ishida said.
The team said robots could help explore the anatomy of animals for which only part of their fossils were known, as well as those missing from the fossil record. “We can build something that we think came in between species A and species B and see: is it plausible? Isn’t that plausible?” Ishida said.
He said robotics can also shed light on species that may yet emerge. “We have all these new kinds of evolutionary pressures from animals living alongside humans, or animals living with climate change, or all these ways that the world as we know it is going to change,” Ishida said. “And so if we understand how evolutionary pressures in the past led to a range of different species, maybe we can have an idea of what’s going to happen in the future.”
Prof Steve Brusatte, a paleontologist at the University of Edinburgh who was not involved in the report, said paleo-inspired robotics held great potential.
“It would be fascinating to build a robot to understand, for example, how giant dinosaurs walk and move. But what is particularly exciting to me is the potential to use robots to study major evolutionary transitions,” he said. “These robots can help us test hypotheses about the history of life.”
