Video of the week: Walking with Orobates

This week’s video comes from Switzerland where scientists have used the fossil and fossilised footprints of a 300-million-year-old Orobates pabsti to create a robot.

Made up of researchers from EPFL and Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, the interdisciplinary team built the robot in order to identify the most likely gaits of extinct animals by recreating their walking style.

Orobates
Orobates fossil (EPFL)

According to EPFL, this study of animal biomechanics using robots could help researchers better understand how vertebrate locomotion evolved over time.

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