Title: Paleorobotics: Design Principles 540 million years in the making

Abstract:
Bioinspiration has provided key design insights in many fields, particularly in robotics, where there has been an explosion of interest in quadrupedal robot “dogs” and bipedal humanoid robots. However, the designs prescribed by only considering living animals are a small subset of available designs; over 99% of all animal species that have ever lived are now extinct. Extinction events in Earth’s history unrelated to mechanical capability repeatedly occur over Geologic time, arbitrarily wiping groups of animals and, in turn, successful, informative biological designs. By only considering living animals, we lose access to design insights only available when considering deep-time, such as more explored regions of design space, repeated design convergence, or changes in design associated with new habitat occupancy. In this talk, I will present work that covers two such evolutionary events: 1) spinal function in the first large animals capable of dynamic behaviors and 2) structural changes in forelimb structure during an environmental transition. I will relate the insights from these projects to more general challenges in design, such as secondary uses for existing structures and developing novel robot designs. Finally, I will outline how these two projects are examples of a more general field of Paleorobotics and the insights they will lend to design philosophy.

Bio:
Aja Carter received her Ph.D. in 2020 from the Earth and Environmental Sciences Department at the University of Pennsylvania. Her PhD work centered on changes in the spinal column spanning the earliest diverse tetrapods that transitioned from aquatic to terrestrial environments. During that time, she also authored papers on 3D printing technologies to probe the fossil record experimentally. Her first postdoctoral appointment was in the Kod*Lab under Professor Daniel Koditschek in the General Robotics Automation Sensing and Perception Lab at the University of Pennsylvania. She published works in theoretical approaches uniting paleobiology and bio-inspired legged robot design during that time. She is currently a postdoctoral researcher in the Robomechanics lab under Professor Aaron Johnson at Carnegie Mellon University, where she is exploring robot design in quadrupedal robots and investigating spring and damper properties in the spines of the earliest large herbivores through multi-material printing. She is a member of the Explorers Club, Sigma XI Honor Society, and the National Society for Black Engineers.