TomboT
Co Admin
Joined: 16 Oct 2005
Posts: 11
|
 Posted: Fri Mar 09, 2007 5:13 pm Post subject: Robo-salamander's evolution clues - Remind you of anything? |
 |
|
Robo-salamander's evolution clues
A robot is being used by a Franco-Swiss team to investigate how the first land animals on Earth might have walked.
The bot looks a lot like a salamander; and the scientists can change the way it swims, slithers and crawls with commands sent wirelessly from a PC.
The group says it provides new insight into the nervous system changes aquatic lifeforms would have had to acquire to move to a terrestrial existence.
The researchers report their study in the latest edition of Science magazine.
By mimicking the nervous system and the movements of the salamander, the team hoped "to decode perhaps some of what happened during evolution", Auke Jan Ijspeert, of Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne, told BBC News.
"Their brains are more or less only involved to regulate the speed and direction," said Mr Ijspeert.
"A decapitated chicken that runs for a while even without the brain is a good example of spinal cord regulation of locomotion."
Read More, BBC
_________________
http://www.tombot.net |
|
