Paleo-inspired Robotics

Paleoinspired robotics - the natural evolution of bioinspired robotics

Bioinspired robots have long been used to study nature by providing ways to produce structured experiments. Experimenters can manipulate the exact characteristics of a robot's morphology or motion while leaving others constant and can even induce features that are not observed in real specimens to study counterfactual cases!

Paleoinspired robotics takes this one step further to study species of the past that cannot be observed outside of static, often incomplete fossils. Robots can produce data about plausible or implausible motions and body shapes that wouldn't be possible to gather otherwise. Furthermore, we can build a variety of robots much faster than nature can produce new mutations or entirely new species, giving us the possibility of millions of years of robotic evolution in a single day.

This paradigm of robotics-enabled paleontology research is helpful for uncovering principles of locomotion (e.g., the great transitions in locomotory history) that stretch over the history of life on earth and we hope to motivate other researchers to get involved in this new avenue of research!

Ishida M., Berio F., Di Santo V., Shubin N. H., Iida F. (2024) "Paleoinspired robotics as an experimental approach to the history of life", Science Robotics, 9 (95), adn1125.