For example, centipedes use their many legs to walk on land but tuck their legs against their sides and undulate their body, like an eel, to swim. How animals control their locomotion across different substrates like water and land, or how different species control different body plans (i.e., varying numbers of limbs) is not clear. Professor Emily Standen (uOttawa), Auke Ijspeert (EPFL, Switzerland) and Aiko Ishiguro (Tohoku, Japan) combined their expertise in bio-robotics and simulation models with animal experimentation to test the hypothesis that a single control principle might explain a diversity of locomotor modes across species and substrates.
The team uses real biomechanical data from amphibious salamanders, fish and centipedes to create simulation models of animal control systems. These simulations replicate animal motion across substrates and morphologies by creating simplified neural control systems and patterns. Once models ‘behave’ well in the virtual environment, they are used to control bio-mimetic robots that then interact with the complex mechanical feedback of the real world. By altering the simulation control parameters, and watching the change in ‘behaviour’ of the robots, this project gains insights into the aspects of the neural control system that are critically important to ensure competent behaviour across body forms and substrates. For example, their recent work used centipede locomotion to discover that a combination of distributed neural oscillators can synchronize walking behaviour, but without brain-derived command signals, the animal cannot swim.
Funded by the Human Frontier Science Program (HFSP), this collaboration has provided international and interdisciplinary research experience to uOttawa trainees and fostered a lasting collaborative relationship between researchers at uOttawa and the prestigious École Polytechnique de Lausanne in Switzerland, and Tohoku University in Japan. HFSP promotes international collaboration in basic research focused on the elucidation of the sophisticated and complex mechanisms of living organisms. This is a remarkable opportunity in pure science, untethered by industrial applications, which allows creativity and curiosity to drive knowledge forward.
