Quadrupedal mammals as paragons for walking machines

Hartmut Witte (1) , R Hackert (2) , W Ilg , J Biltzinger , N Schilling , F Biedermann , Michael Jergas , H Preuschoft , M S Fischer

1 Institut für Spezielle Zoologie und Evolutionsbiologie
2 Friedrich-Schiller-Universität = Friedrich Schiller University Jena [Jena, Germany]

The idea of building artificial animals is an old dream of manhood, handed down through centuries by mythology and poetry. May it be the Troian horse, Olympia the puppet or L. A. Ryggs "Mechanical horse", always the concepts aimed at an artificial humanoid or at reverse engineering of one of man's pets. Not surprisingly Sony's ® "AIBO" as the first commercially available "animate" is a biomomimetic copy of a pet. This anthropocentric approach ignores the fact that ancestral animals as well as most of the currently living animals are and were small-in the size of a mouse or a rat. We and our pets inherited most of our locomotory capabilities from the ancestral mammals, adapting mechanisms and control by only a a small amount in comparison to what happened 200,000,000 years ago when "modern" mammals were derived from reptile-like forms in a dramatical "reconstruction process". "Biological inspiration" of walking machines using mammals as paragons has to be founded on knowledge about the basic principles of mammalian locomotion, visible in small species. From this starting point, special locomotory adaptations of large cursorial mammals like humans, camels or horses may be identified and seperated from what is our common evolutionary heritage.

Domaines: Biologie animale

Hartmut Witte, R Hackert, W Ilg, J Biltzinger, N Schilling, et al.. Quadrupedal mammals as paragons for walking machines. International Symposium on Adaptive Motion of Animals and Machines, Kimura H, Tsuchiya K, Ischiguro A, Witte H., Aug 2000, Montreal, Canada. ⟨hal-02178805⟩