PaleoPerformance: Connections between Paleobiology and Bioinspired Robots

Biological inspiration has provided key design subsets of robotics, where there has been an explosion of interest in quadrupedal and bipedal humanoid robots. However, the diversity of available biological designs is constrained by many facets, including geologic and evolutionary history. Throughout Earth's history, there have been abiotic extinctions unrelated to task-based deficits, such as the asteroid event that led to the extinction of non-avian dinosaurs. Moreover, within the paleobiological community, early burst models of evolution suggest that some groups of animals explore more regions of their design space early in their evolutionary history. The challenge of applying these deep-time observations to bio-inspired robotics is that the fossilization process prohibits direct observation of extinct taxa. In this talk, I will introduce and relate paleobiological tenets and their evolutionary significance to bio-inspired robot design. I will then discuss my current work in defossilization techniques, a process that allows paleobiologists to evaluate extinct taxa's performance similarly to living taxa, opening up the biological design space. I will conclude by discussing the future directions of my work, including spined quadrupedal robots.