Researchers from the Biorobotics Laboratory of the Swiss Federal Polytechnic University of Lausanne (Swiss Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne, EPFL) have long been developing robots copied from various species of living creatures, with which they study the neurobiological principles that ensure the movement of these animals . And one of the latest creations of Swiss researchers is the AgnathaX robot, which can swim in the water, like a sea eel.
The purpose of creating the AgnathaX robot was to study how the nervous system should process and respond to sensory information in order to produce a particular type of movement. After all, the study of such things with the help of real living organisms is associated with a number of technical difficulties, some of which are insurmountable at the present time.
The design of the AgnathaX robot is based on the structure of the body of a fish of the lamprey family, primitive fish resembling a sea eel. The robot's body is divided into ten segments that copy the muscles located along the body of a living being. Each of the segments has two pressure sensors that mimic the pressure-sensitive cells on the skin of a lamprey, which allows the robot to "feel" the force of water resistance during movement.
The AgnathaX robot, whose control system microprocessors contain the results of modeling the nervous system of a living being, swims in a pool equipped with a motion tracking system. And, during the experiments, the scientists had the opportunity to activate or deactivate separate input data channels and output channels of the simulated nervous system for each segment of the robot's body separately.
The data collected by scientists indicate that the complex movement of a living being is ensured by the coordinated work of the peripheral and central nervous systems. At the same time, pressure sensors play almost the most important role in all this, the signals they produce are a kind of synchronization for the work of the nervous system and the activity of muscles during movement.
And in conclusion, it should be noted that the creation of robots like AgnathaX allows scientists to test various hypotheses from the field of neuroscience. And in the future, the information obtained in this way can be used to create machines that imitate living beings, prostheses and many other things.