Dynamic Scaling and Synthetic Nervous Systems - Two Frameworks for Building Robots that Model Animals

Explore how robots can serve as powerful tools for studying animal nervous systems and locomotion control in this 34-minute webinar presented by Dr. Nicholas Szczecinski from West Virginia University. Learn about two key frameworks for building biologically-inspired robots: dynamic scaling and synthetic nervous systems. Discover how dynamic scaling ensures that the same physical forces (gravity, inertia, elastic forces) dominate both robot and animal motion by adjusting the robot's speed relative to the animal model. Understand how synthetic nervous systems create control systems constrained to the types of computations actual nervous systems perform through real-time simulation of neural dynamics. Examine the construction of insect-inspired walking robots that mimic specific species' kinematics while incorporating biomimetic sensors and filters to process sensory feedback similar to what animals experience. Gain insights into how these robotic models enable experiments difficult to perform with live animals, such as simultaneous data recording from every sensor during task performance. See how these robots serve as substrates for accumulating experimental discoveries and testing mechanisms understood to function in living organisms, with applications for studying sensorimotor control of legged locomotion and potential deployment in challenging environments like forests, caves, mines, and disaster sites.