Everybody’s doing the locomotion

A group of European researchers has developed a spinal cord model of the salamander and implemented it in a salamander like robot. The robot changes its speed and gait in response to simple electrical signals, sugpgesting that the distributed neural system in the spinal cord holds the key to vertebrates’ complex locomotor capabilities. The scientists – from EPFL in Switzerland and INSERM/University of Bordeaux in France – claim their robot reveals a great deal about the evolution of vertebrate locomotion. EPFL professor Auke Ijspeert said: “Nature has found a nice way of making a sophisticated circuit in the spinal cord and then controlling the muscles from there. It’s a fantastic solution for coordinating multiple degrees of freedom in a simple distributed way.” According to the researchers, their work could result in robots that can change their speed, direction and gait based on simple remote signals; useful in search and rescue operations, for example.