Robotic Lamprey Answers Neuroscience Questions

An international team of researchers built this robotic lamprey to study neuroscience.

Cameron Coward
3 years agoRobotics / Sensors

Vertebrates, including humans, have a central nervous system (CNS) and a peripheral nervous system (PNS). The brain and spinal cord make up the CNS, while the PNS consists of the nerves and sensory tissue throughout the rest of the body. The CNS and PNS work together under most circumstances. But lamprey fish — they aren't eels — can continue to swim, even with a spinal cord lesion that we would expect to block the CNS. To figure out how, a team of scientists built a robotic lamprey to answer questions about this quirk of neuroscience.

This robot, called AgnathaX, is the result of work from researchers at EPFL (École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne), Japan's Tohku University, France's Institut Mines-Télécom Atlantique, and Canada's Universitéde Sherbrooke. In addition to lamprey neuroscience research, AgnathaX is useful in its own right for tasks like search and rescue or environmental monitoring. The long robot's body is a series of interconnected servo motors, which let it wriggle like a biological lamprey. An Arduino Mini development board controls those motors, giving the robot the ability to swim.

Force plates line the robot's body and feed pressure data to the Arduino through load cells amplified by SparkFun HX711 modules. That data helps tweak the robot's motor movement so it can swim effectively. This also gave the researchers an opportunity to mimic a lamprey's ability to swim with a spinal cord lesion. They could simulate such a lesion by selectively disabling the artificial CNS communication, meaning the Arduino couldn't coordinate the motors further down from the "lesion." Even so, the robot could still swim, with each motor beyond the lesion reacting to only the readings from its own force sensors.

This provides a very interesting look into how some animals have evolved to compensate for neural disruptions. That information is interesting to neuroscientists and also helps roboticists understand how they can create robust robots that continue to work when damaged.

Cameron Coward
Writer for Hackster News. Proud husband and dog dad. Maker and serial hobbyist. Check out my YouTube channel: Serial Hobbyism
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