EAGER: Extinct Does Not Imply Unfit: Paleobiology, Defossilization, and New Sources for Novel Robots

About This Grant

This EArly-concept Grant for Exploratory Research (EAGER) award supports research to extend the sources of bio-inspired robotics beyond extant species and into the fossil record. Present-day challenges in robot locomotion may be solved by unique strategies evolved by animals that subsequently became extinct for unrelated reasons. These strategies may be revealed through careful study of surviving skeletons, including computer simulation of likely muscle and tendon arrangements, a process sometimes referred to as “defossilization.” The specific goal of this collaboration between a roboticist and a paleobiologist is to demonstrate the potential for transformative robot engineering through reconstructing backbone and limb anatomy from a variety of four-legged animals that lived over 235 million years ago. New robots created based on the results look to highlight how body shape, joint configurations, and movement patterns may be customized to robustly traverse uneven ground and confined spaces, allowing freedom of movement through dense vegetation areas or in industrial clutter. The project will also develop a "Dinosaurs and Robots" educational module suitable for afterschool programs. Ninety-nine percent of all species that have ever lived are now extinct. Many of these species had unique morphologies not seen today, and their extinction was typically unrelated to their functional fitness. This project seeks to demonstrate the value of these lost adaptations through a study of spine and limb features in a group of Triassic and Permian species, including Massetognathus, Lycaenops, and Orobates. These species differ notably from the configurations seen in living animals, namely pitch spines with upright legs that dominate in mammals, or yaw spines with sprawled legs that prevail among modern reptiles. Feasible force space analysis will be applied to reveal how these animals may have circumvented small obstacles and navigated narrow passages and to identify relationships and trade-offs in environmental conditions, anatomical morphology, and musculature performance. The project looks to incorporate these insights into new robot designs, which will be tested in both simulation and hardware experiments, to demonstrate performance advantages over conventional robots. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.