Meet the swimming robot inspired by an ancient parasitic fish

Speaker 1: This robot was inspired by an ancient bloodsucking parasite. I spoke to one of its creators to find out how it works, what researchers are learning from it. And of course the question on everybody's mind, why let's get into it. Speaker 2: Now I have a company here in Switzerland and, uh, what we do is actually animal roots, Speaker 1: Scientists and engineers have long been inspired [00:00:30] to put the natural innovations of evolution into robots, inspired by all sorts of creatures. Here's what it was about. Lampre those jawless parasitic fish that captured the interest of Camil and his team of researchers. So Speaker 2: Basically they are, uh, one of our ancestors, like a very, very, very old ancestors of us, and they haven't changed much in these 400 millions of years. So that means that studying this very primitive animal will give us very good [00:01:00] insights in studying current locomotion of, you know, modern animals, including, uh, ourselves. Speaker 1: The result of this biology inspired engineering was a robot named Agni X Speaker 2: Agna means, uh, yo fish, lamb braces are very primitive. They don't even have a yo, so they don't have a Mount like that. They just have a sucking thing blow in tax Somy. This is called Les in Latin, I guess it's called Aneta. And because we have 10 models, so just put the Roman X. [00:01:30] So Ana attack, Speaker 1: Thankfully Anaac is not programmed to drink blood. It exists rather to help study the relationship between our spines and peripheral nervous systems. Speaker 2: The reason we move. So G Gracely and then we, we can do many things. And so on is because of the spinal cord coordinates this motion. It's not really the brain that is commanding the hands to do things or the legs to do the next step on is the spinal cord. And sometimes even lower nervous systems that doesn't even come to the spinal cord, but just directly, like, for example, the reflexes, [00:02:00] the signal doesn't come back to the, to your brain because you need to so quickly, like for example, when you're walking, take a look at one of your articulations, you go up and down, up and down, you flex and extend flex and extend. So everything is a cycle. So similar happen to the lamp break when the lamping, which is an atory animal like this, these neural centers, they coordinate automatically, and then they create this. These now this coordination is because all these sensor are also Speaker 1: Connected. In addition to the robotic spinal cord coordinating the [00:02:30] swimming movement Anaac is also equipped with sensors on its sides. That detect changes in water pressure, like the peripheral nervous system of a Lampry would do. And so there is this Speaker 2: Big debate. And again, this is like a sensory debate. Like it is only the central nervous system that controls the motion, or is actually only the, the periferal control. What we are saying in this article is they are both, so maybe tend to do it more towards the central SOS, try to do it more towards the, the peripheral, [00:03:00] but the combination of the two things at the same time increase the robustness. And we are proving that by inducing these lesions or what we call numerous disruptions to the robot and improving that the combination between central and peripheral, uh, increase the robustness and make the animal still swing Speaker 1: Using robots in this way, also ensures that animals aren't harmed in the research process. Speaker 2: So imagine if you try to investigate the same thing in an animal, you will be basically, you know, killing the animal because [00:03:30] you need to induce really a lot of cuts in this spinal Corone is an inside joke is like a, you put an animal in a blender and then you make it swim. So of course not gonna swim, right? But with the road, we can allow to do that. And we do it in a very systematic way because we have everything organized in controllers that are distributed. So we can tell this controller, turn off the insulator. We can tell this other controller, turn off the communication. We can tell this other to turn off at the same time, the communication and the controller, but keep the sensors [00:04:00] on site. So you feel the fluid outside. And with that information, you basically surrogate the other informations, and then you have a complete, uh, signal. So you can still swim. Speaker 1: So what's next for this swimming robotics, spinal cord and the team of researchers that created it. Speaker 2: We can use the same time of, of controllers, the same kind of controller to so steer the robot in a fluid or what happen if the fluid is actually not like a steady fluid, but we do have tur laces and so on in a very, very long term, [00:04:30] I guess we can really go for some engineering applications. Swimming is a very important thing. You know, we've been in the, in the new, we are going to Mar soon. I don't know, but, uh, most of the erosions are unexplored. Having more swimming robots in these cases will allow us to explore even better things. But for that, you really need very animal-like capabilities and robustness. In this case, this is a, this is a good way to start also going Speaker 1: There as always thanks so much for watching. I'm your host, Jesse [00:05:00] ORs. See you next time with the fam.