This Robot Swims Like a Lamphrey but Uses a Slow Gait on Land

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The first animal to crawl onto land from the ocean probably looked a bit like today's salamander, and researchers have wondered how it was able to switch from swimming to walking.

Now, European scientists have built a robot with a primitive electric nervous system that they say mimics that change in motion.

The robot doesn't look much like a salamander -- it's nearly a yard long and made of nine bright yellow plastic segments each containing a battery and microcontroller -- but it does seem to move like one.

The point was to understand how a spinal cord developed to direct a swimming motion that could handle the different coordination needed between a body and its limbs for walking, according to the team led by Auke Jan Ijspeert of the Ecole Polytechnique Federale in Lausanne, Switzerland.

So they first designed a basic nervous system modeled on that of the lamprey, a long, primitive eel-like fish. Then that design was modified to show how it could evolve into a nervous system that also could control walking.

And to prove their point, they built the salamander robot -- which walks across floors, down the beach and even manages to swim in Lake Geneva.

Its swimming motion uses undulations like the lamprey, while on land the robot uses a slow stepping gait with diagonally opposed limbs moving together while the body forms an S-shape.