Robot Salamander May Give Evolution Clues

The first animal to crawl onto land from the ocean probably looked a bit like today's salamander, and researchers have wondered how it was able to switch from swimming to walking.

Now, European scientists have built a robot with a primitive electric nervous system that they say mimics that change in motion.

The robot doesn't look much like a salamander—it's nearly a yard long and made of nine bright yellow plastic segments each containing a battery and microcontroller—but it does seem to move like one.

The point was to understand how a spinal cord developed to direct a swimming motion that could handle the different coordination needed between a body and its limbs for walking, according to the team led by Auke Jan Ijspeert of the Ecole Polytechnique Federale in Lausanne, Switzerland.

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