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Soft robotics is the study of making robots from soft materials, which has the advantage of flexibility and safety in human interactions. These robots are well-suited for applications starting from medical devices to enhancing efficiency in various tasks. Moreover, using different types of robotic movement might also serve us well in exploring the ocean or space, or doing certain jobs in those environments.
To broaden our understanding of locomotion, Richard Desatnik, who works within the labs of Philip LeDuc and Carmel Majidi at Carnegie Mellon University and collaborates with paleontologists from Europe, turns to the past. The team creates robots with the movement of ancient animals resembling pleurocystitids, a sea creature that lived around 500 million years ago. Desatnik will present their findings from the strategy of constructing a soft robot based on pleurocystitids on the 68th Biophysical Society Annual Meeting, to be held February 10 — 14, 2024 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
“We have learned loads from modern creatures, but that is only one% of the animals which have existed during our planet’s history, and we would like to see if there’s something we are able to learn from the opposite 99% of creatures that after roamed the earth,” Desatnik said. He added, “there are animals that were very successful for thousands and thousands of years and the explanation they died out wasn’t from an absence of success from their biology — there can have been a large environmental change or extinction event.”
Desatnik and colleagues began off with fossils of pleurocystitids, that are related to present-day sea stars and sea urchins but that had a muscular stem — a form of tail — to maneuver. They used CT scans to get a greater idea of the 3D shape. Computer simulations suggested the ways it can have propelled itself through the water. Based on these data, they built a soft robot that mimics the prehistoric creature.
Their work suggests that a sweeping motion of the stem could have helped these animals glide along the ocean floor. Additionally they found that an extended stem — which the fossil record suggests pleurocystitids developed over generations — could have made them faster without requiring way more energy.
These underwater soft robots may assist in the longer term, “whether it’s geologic surveying, or fixing all of the machinery that we’ve got underwater,” Desatnik points out.
The researchers’ approach of using extinct animals to tell soft robotic design, which they call paleobionics, has the potential to further our understanding of evolution, biomechanics, and soft robot movements.
