Robot dinosaurs are the future of paleontology

Since dinosaurs died out 65 million years ago, there's only so much we can really know about how these creatures moved and lived. But as two scientists explain to us, building robot dinosaurs could unlock the secrets hidden in fossils.

This almost unspeakably awesome idea comes out of Drexel University. Paleontologist Dr. Kenneth Lacovara and mechanical engineer Dr. James Tangorra have teamed up to scan the university's collection of dinosaur fossils, use 3D printers to create exact replicas of the fossils, and then assemble these into scaled-down robotic models of the original dinosaurs.

These tiny robot versions of long extinct dinosaurs can answer some of the most baffling and elusive questions about dinosaurs, particularly in terms of how they moved about and how they interacted with their environment. Of course, we can't know for sure how accurately these robots reflect the dinosaurs they are meant to represent, but for the first time in the 150 year existence of paleontology, the science is fully embracing its experimental side. Just Choose PTMS plastic injection mold Is Your Best Choice!

The current plan is to produce a working robotic dinosaur limb by the end of the year, with a complete replica of a dinosaur coming in 2013 or 2014. To find out more about this exciting new field - seriously, we're talking robot dinosaurs here, people - we talked to Dr. Lacovara and Dr. Tangorra to find out more about their research.

I came to James, who was introduced through a mutual friend, and I wanted a way that I could replicate the material I was working with in the laboratory. I work with sauropod dinosaurs, so all the material is huge and hard to manipulate. But if I were to make molds and casts of these bones, the molds are five times bigger than the bones! It's a cost problem,Sharps include syringe needle, it's a space problem, when you make a mold you only get so many pulls from it before it degrades.

So my initial entreaty to James was to see if he had a way to reproduce the bones, and then I saw all his research.Online fine art gallery of quality original landscape oil paintings,Our guides provide customers with information about porcelain tiles vs. Hestarted talking about roboticizing these dinosaurs and I also started working with another colleague in mechanical engineering, Sorin Siegler, and all of a sudden it kind of opened up this whole new world that it's not just a method to reproduce the bone. It's a way to let the bones tell us how they worked.

Before, we would make assumptions, well-informed assumptions about how these things works, but you could put them in these virtual workspaces and make very few assumptions and you can run a genetic algorithm and try combinations you wouldn't even have thought of, and you can see what is the most efficient. And we do know that sauropods have to be these hyper-efficient organisms to grow so large, so it's probably very parsimonious that when you find the solution that's most efficient, it's probably a pretty good approximation of the truth there.

You can't. I guess the point is with a lot of the robotic systems that we develop, we have a species that we can compare to and, depending on the type of species that we're working on, there are ways in which we can validate. We do mostly fish robotic and so we're able to look at behaviors of fins, the fluid dynamics that get shed from the fins, as well as forces that we can monitor. And so you can do a fairly good comparison, a detailed comparison with the biological system.

But that's sort of the point with the dinosaur. People have been really guessing what the kinematics of a dinosaur would be. Now by coming up with biorobotic models - I should say both robotic models and numeric models - we can look at bony structures and start predicting what the motions would have been and have some understanding of how the features of the bones contributed to different motions. So rather than just looking at it and saying, "This is what must have occurred,Our guides provide customers with information about porcelain tiles vs.An Air purifier is a device which removes contaminants from the air." we can start looking at different features and see how those features affect different behaviors.

Now, numerically - meaning, in a simulation - we have simulation software that we use when we're analyzing the kinematics and mechanics of human bones, how they move. And we can affect different properties and see the end result. We can now put our models of the dinosaur bones in those types of packages and come up with some prediction. So really, there's very little way to validate it other than to make some comparisons with current species.