Carnegie Mellon University researchers have developed Rhombot, a soft-bodied robot modeled after a 450-million-year-old fossil. The school teamed up with paleontologists from Spain and Poland to introduce Paleobionics, a field aimed at using Softbotics, or robotics with flexible electronics and soft materials.
By combining computational simulations and soft robots, a research team led by LeDuc and Carmel Majidi were able to recreate pleurocystitid, a marine organism that existed nearly 450 million years ago, new life. It is a member of the echinoderm class, which includes modern day star fish, and was one of the first echinoderms capable of movement using a muscular stem.
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Softbotics is another approach to inform science using soft materials to construct flexible robot limbs and appendages. A lot of fundamental principles of biology and nature can only fully be explained if we look back at the evolutionary timeline of how animals evolved. We are building robot analogues to study how locomotion has changed,” explained Majidi, lead author and professor of mechanical engineering,” said Phil LeDuc, Professor of Mechanical Engineering at CMU.
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