This is Pleurobot.
Pleurobot is a robot that we designed to closely mimic a salamander species
called ??
Pleurobot can walk, as you can see here,
and as you'll see later, it can also swim.
So you might ask, why did we design this robot?
And in fact, this robot has been designed as a scientific tool for neuroscience.
Indeed, we designed it together with neurobiologists
to understand how animals move,
and especially how the spinal cord controls locomotion.
But the more I work in biorobotics,
the more I'm really impressed by animal locomotion.
If you think of a dolphin swimming or a cat running or jumping around,
or even us as humans,
when you go jogging or play tennis,
we do amazing things.
And in fact, our nervous system solves a very, very complex control problem.
It has to coordinate more or less 200 muscles perfectly,
because if the coordination is bad, we fall over or we do bad locomotion.
And my goal is to understand how this works.
There are four main components behind animal locomotion.
The first component is just the body,
and in fact we should never underestimate what extent the biomechanics
already simplify locomotion in animals.
Then you have the spinal cord,
and in the spinal cord you find reflexes,
like multiple reflexes that create a sensory motor coordination loop
between neural activity in the spinal cord and mechanical activity.
A third component are central pattern generators.
These are very interesting circuits in the spinal cord of vertebrate animals
that can generate, by themselves, very coordinated rhythmic patterns of activity
while receiving only very simple input signals.
And these input signals come from descending modulation
from higher parts of the brain, from the motor cortex, the cerebellum,
the basal ganglia, will all modulate activity of the spinal cord
while we do locomotion.
But what's interesting is to what extent just a low level component,
the spinal cord, together with the body, already solves a big part
of the locomotion problem,
and you probably know it by the fact that you can cut the head of the chicken,
it can still run for a while,
showing that just the lower part, spinal cord and body,
already solves a big part of locomotion.
Now, understanding how this works is very complex,
because first of all,
recording activity in the spinal cord is very difficult.
It's much easier to implant electrodes in the motor cortex
than in the spinal cord, because it's protected by the vertebrae.
Especially in humans, it's very hard to do.
A second difficulty is that locomotion is really due to a very complex
and very dynamic interaction between these four components.
So it's very hard to find out what's the role of each over time.
This is where biorobots like Pleurobot and mathematical models
can really help.
So what's biorobotics?
Biorobotics is a very active field of research in robotics
where people want to take inspiration from animals to make robots
to go outdoors,
like service robots or search-and-rescue robots
or field robots,
and the big goal here is to take inspiration from animals
to make robotics that can handle complex terrain --
stairs, mountains, forests,
places where robots still have difficulties
and where animals can do a much better job.
The robot can be a wonderful scientific tool as well.
There are some very nice projects where robots are used
like a scientific tool for neuroscience, for biomechanics, or for ?? dynamics.
And this is exactly the purpose of Pleurobot.
So what we do in my lab is to collaborate with neurobiologists
like Jean-Marie Cabelguen, a neurobiologist in Bordeaux in France,
and we want to make spinal cord models and validate them on robots.
And here we want to start simple.
So it's good to start with simple animals
like lampreys, which are very primitive fish,
and then gradually go toward more complex locomotion,
like in salamanders,
but also in cats and in humans,
in mammals.
And here, a robot becomes an interesting tool
to validate our models,
and in fact, for me, Pleurobot is a kind of dream becoming true.
Like, more or less 20 years ago I was already working on a computer
making simulations of lamprey and salamander locomotion
during my Ph.D