When researchers at Switzerland’s EPFL set out to build Pleurobot, they spent hours looking at 3D X-ray videos of a salamanders walking, swimming, and walking underwater. The videos tracked up to 48 points on the animals bodies.
The “bones” in Pleurobot don’t match up one-to-one with a salamander’s skeleton, but they’re close enough to reproduce its many postures and positions. To match the animal’s movements, the researchers applied neural network models that mimic pattern generators in the spinal cord to control “virtual muscles.”
via Gizmodo
