Thanks to their swimming robot modeled after a lamprey, EPFL scientists may have discovered why some vertebrates are able to retain their locomotor capabilities after a spinal cord lesion. The finding could also help improve the performance of swimming robots used for search and rescue missions and for environmental monitoring.
Scientists at the Biorobotics Laboratory (BioRob) in EPFL’s School of Engineering are developing innovative robots in order to study locomotion in animals and, ultimately, gain a better understanding of the neuroscience behind the generation of movement. One such robot is AgnathaX, a swimming robot employed in an international study with researchers from EPFL as well as Tohoku University in Japan, Institut Mines-Télécom Atlantique in Nantes, France, and Université de Sherbrooke in Canada. The study has just been published in Science Robotics.
“Our goal with this robot was to examine how the nervous system processes sensory information so as to produce a given kind of movement,” says Prof. Auke Ijspeert, the head of BioRob. “This mechanism is hard to study in living organisms because the different components of the central and peripheral nervous systems* are highly interconnected within the spinal cord. That makes it hard to understand their dynamics and the influence they have on each other.”
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