Fossil being brought back to life at Carnegie Mellon University
Robot designers from Carnegie Mellon University worked together to recreate ancient organisms in robot form.
Professor Carmel Majidi first developed a robot starfish that uses an alloy of nickel and titanium to bring it to life. Continuing to improve the design is goal number one.
"Part of the reason is we want to make robots better in the sense that they're more lifelike, in their versatility, their mobility, their ability to kind of maneuver through say tight, confined spaces, more mimic kind of some of the natural properties of organisms," Majidi said.
Mechanical engineering professor Philip LeDuc was chatting with Majidi when the idea of recreating actual dinosaur tissue was brought up.
The CMU professors acknowledged that in order to properly take on this project, they needed to meet with experts. So, the two reached out to paleontologists from Europe.
"So they were like, oh, there's the fantastic creature that was one of the first starting to move. It used to just sit in ponds trying to feed, and all of a sudden it started moving, so we have all these fossils right, but we have no idea how they started moving," LeDuc recalled the paleontologists saying.
Recreating a robot Pleurocysitid was the new mission.
"It was the first echinoderm, so the first aquatic organism to use a muscular stem to push itself forward. So this is an evolutionary breakthrough," Majidi said.
The recreation of the Pleurocysticid uses the same alloys as the starfish that act like a muscle when stimulated.
The Pittsburgh scientists hope that their creation will lead to a better understanding of our past.
"This is our closest we can get to kind of resurrecting these organisms, so there's a lot of value for the biology community for our collaborators in paleontology," Majidi said.
"Everything I do, there's some value to humanity. I live by the adage try to make the world a better place," LeDuc said.