Key points:
- Researchers used fossil evidence to engineer a soft robotic replica of a pleurocystitid—a marine organism that existed about 450-million-years-ago.
- The team used Softbotics—robotics with flexible electronics and soft materials—to engineer the extinct organism and understand the biomechanical factors related to its evolution.
- Softbotics opens new possibilities to study extinct organisms, including the first organisms that traveled from sea to land.
Researchers used fossil evidence to engineer a soft robotic replica of pleurocystitid—a marine organism that existed about 450 million years ago. The study, published in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS), aims to broaden the perspective of modern design and movement by introducing a new field of study called Paleobionics.
The field of Paleobionics relies on the Softbotics approach. In Softbotics, scientists construct robotics with flexible electronics and soft materials to better understand the biomechanical factors that drive evolution.
“Softbotics is another approach to inform science using soft materials to construct flexible robot limbs and appendages,” said lead author Carmel Majidi, professor at Carnegie Mellon University. “Many fundamental principles of biology and nature can only fully be explained if we look back at the evolutionary timeline of how animals evolved.”
Guided by fossil evidence, researchers designed the soft robot with a combination of 3D printed elements and polymers mimicking the flexible columnar structure of the pleurocystitid moving appendage. They demonstrated that the organism likely moved over the sea bottom by using its muscular stem in wide sweeping movements and increasing the length of the stem to increase speed without exerting excess energy.
Now that the team has utilized Softbotics to engineer extinct organisms, they hope to investigate other animals, including the first organisms that travelled from sea to land.
“Bringing new life to something that existed nearly 500 million years ago is exciting in and of itself, but what really excites us about this breakthrough is how much we will be able to learn from it,” explained co-first author Richard Desatnik. “We aren’t just looking at fossils in the ground, we are trying to better understand life through working with amazing paleontologists.”