{"page":"\u003clink rel=\"stylesheet\" href=\"https://lessonplanet.com/assets/packs/css/resources-c03aa079.css\" /\u003e\n\u003clink rel=\"stylesheet\" href=\"https://lessonplanet.com/assets/packs/css/lp_boclips_stylesheets-517835be.css\" media=\"all\" /\u003e\n\u003cdiv data-title='Using robots to discover how predators and their prey evolved' data-url='/boclips/videos/5c54c4b1d8eafeecae16a9b2' data-video-url='/boclips/videos/5c54c4b1d8eafeecae16a9b2' id='bo_player_modal'\u003e\n\u003cdiv class='boclips-resource-page modal-dialog panel-container'\u003e\n\u003cdiv class='react-notifications-root'\u003e\u003c/div\u003e\n\u003cdiv class='rp-header'\u003e\n\u003cdiv class='rp-type'\u003e\n\u003ci aria-hidden='true' class='fai fa-regular fa-circle-play'\u003e\u003c/i\u003e\nVideo\n\u003c/div\u003e\n\u003ch1 class='rp-title' id='video-title'\u003e\nUsing robots to discover how predators and their prey evolved\n\u003c/h1\u003e\n\u003cdiv class='rp-actions'\u003e\n\u003cdiv class='mr-1'\u003e\n\u003ca class=\"btn btn-success\" data-posthog-event=\"Signup: LP Signup Activity\" data-posthog-location=\"body_link_boclips\" data-remote=\"true\" href=\"/subscription/new\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003e\u003cspan\u003eGet Free Access\u003c/span\u003e\u003cspan class=\"\"\u003e for 10 Days\u003c/span\u003e\u003cspan\u003e!\u003c/span\u003e\u003c/span\u003e\u003c/a\u003e\n\u003c/div\u003e\n\u003c/div\u003e\n\u003c/div\u003e\n\u003cdiv class='rp-body'\u003e\n\u003cdiv class='rp-info'\u003e\n\u003cdiv aria-label='Hide resource details' class='rp-hide-info' role='button' tabindex='0'\u003e\u0026times;\u003c/div\u003e\n\u003ci aria-label='Expand resource details' class='rp-expand-info fai fa-solid fa-up-right-and-down-left-from-center' role='button' tabindex='0'\u003e\u003c/i\u003e\n\u003ci aria-label='Compress resource details' class='rp-compress-info fai fa-solid fa-down-left-and-up-right-to-center' role='button' tabindex='0'\u003e\u003c/i\u003e\n\u003cdiv class='rp-rating'\u003e\n\u003cspan class='resource-pool'\u003e\n\u003cspan class='pool-label'\u003ePublisher:\u003c/span\u003e\n\u003cspan class='pool-name'\u003e\n\u003cspan class='text'\u003e\u003ca data-publisher-id=\"30356011\" href=\"/search?publisher_ids%5B%5D=30356011\"\u003eCurated Video\u003c/a\u003e\u003c/span\u003e\n\u003c/span\u003e\n\u003c/span\u003e\n\u003c/div\u003e\n\u003cdiv class='rp-description'\u003e\n\u003cspan class='short-description'\u003e20 MAY 2009, Poughkeepsie, NY1. Wide pan of Vassar College Campus in Poughkeepsie, NY2. Pan female Vassar student placing robot \"fish\" in tank filled with water3. Wide shot of Vassar professor talking to students gathered around tank4....\u003c/span\u003e\n\u003cspan class='full-description hide'\u003e20 MAY 2009, Poughkeepsie, NY\u003cbr/\u003e1. Wide pan of Vassar College Campus in Poughkeepsie, NY\u003cbr/\u003e2. Pan female Vassar student placing robot \"fish\" in tank filled with water\u003cbr/\u003e3. Wide shot of Vassar professor talking to students gathered around tank\u003cbr/\u003e4. Pan from \"predator\" robot to \"prey robot\"\u003cbr/\u003e5. SOUNDBITE:  (English):  John Long, Vassar College biology and cognitive science professor:\u003cbr/\u003e\"What the project's all about is testing evolutionary ideas and the problem with most ideas about evolution is, evolution happened a long time ago, so you can't go back in a time machine and look at stuff. So we're doing the nearest thing we can to building a time machine, which is taking the pieces of the world from 500 million years ago that are interesting to us, building them in the lab and then letting the system go and watching what happens.\"\u003cbr/\u003e6. Mid shot Vassar students changing the tails on the \"prey\" robot\u003cbr/\u003e7. Tight shot of student changing tail\u003cbr/\u003e8. SOUNDBITE:  (English):  John Long, Vassar College biology and cognitive science professor:\u003cbr/\u003e\"One of the reasons we do a robotic world, as opposed to a computer simulation, is that with robots you can't violate the laws of physics and so by making robots that have a body and that we put into a world, they are being very realistic in ways that its very hard to get a computer programme to be realistic.\" \u003cbr/\u003e9. Push in Vassar students on computer\u003cbr/\u003e10. Pull out from computer codes for robot creation, to student\u003cbr/\u003e11. SOUNDBITE:  (English):  Elise Stickles, student of Professor Long's and senior at Vassar College: \u003cbr/\u003e\"When you do something on the computer, you hit compile and it goes, and its sort of like, okay the computer changed, wow. But with robotics you get to see this sort of real life embodiment of all of your work and effort and making real small changes in the code makes huge changes in the real world and seeing that drastic difference between a couple numbers here and there is really exciting and it's a lot of fun.\"\u003cbr/\u003e12. Pull out \"prey\" robot using diversionary tactic to escape from \"predator\" robot\u003cbr/\u003e13. Mid shot students around water tank\u003cbr/\u003e14. Close shot robot in water\u003cbr/\u003e15. SOUNDBITE:  (English):  Sonia Roberts, student of Professor Long's and junior at Vassar College: \u003cbr/\u003e\"Just the fact that we have these cute little autonomous robots that you stick in a tank, you turn them on, you let them go and then they do their thing and then they can tell you so much about stuff that we would have no other way of knowing about. The animals that we're modeling are dead, they have been dead for millions of years. There's no way we can actually go back and look at them in the real world, so its really cool that we can create these proto-dead animals that can swim around for us. They're living fossils.\"\u003cbr/\u003e16. Push in student affixing new tail to \"prey\" robot\u003cbr/\u003e17. Close shots of tails on robots, in water\u003cbr/\u003e18. SOUNDBITE:  (English):  John Long, Vassar College biology and cognitive science professor:\u003cbr/\u003e\"I think the most important discovery we've made so far in this evolutionary robotics project is that it looks like selection for enhanced feeding and predator escape is sufficient to drive the evolution of some of these features of vertebrates that we now recognise most vertebrates have. So that's really important to come with a mechanism, a reason this evolution might have occurred.\" \u003cbr/\u003e19. Wide overhead shot students and professor gathered around tank\u003cbr/\u003e20. Close of \"predator\" robot chasing \"prey\" into light source\u003cbr/\u003e21. SOUNDBITE:  (English):  John Long, Vassar College biology and cognitive science professor:\u003cbr/\u003e\"Right now we have a pretty simple set of fish. We want to do things like add more muscle-like parts to the body. We want to make the brain more complex. We want to allow the robots to learn a little bit too.  And so we want to put in pieces into our robots that make them more like real vertebrates.  We've started with a simple system which gives us an answer and then the question is that answer still the same if you had more realistic robots, so that's one of the things we're going to do.\"\u003cbr/\u003e22. Tilt down of student examining robot\u003cbr/\u003e23. Wide shot of professor and students around tank with robots swimming\u003cbr/\u003e24. Close of both robots swimming away\u003cbr/\u003eA study's underway using robotic technology to discover how predators and their prey evolved 540 million years ago. \u003cbr/\u003eThe robots wag their tail fins and bob along like bathtub toys in a pool at a lab Vassar College, in New York. \u003cbr/\u003eBehind these ancient walls a new experiment is underway to discover how creatures evolved millions of years ago. \u003cbr/\u003eThe actions of these tadpole-like robots are dictated by microprocessors housed in round plastic containers, the sort you'd store soup in.\u003cbr/\u003eIt might not look like it but the two swimming robots were set loose in the little pool to study evolution.\u003cbr/\u003eThe two machines are acting out predator-prey encounters from roughly 540 million years ago. And the prey robot, dubbed Preyro, can evolve.\u003cbr/\u003eThis is not like robot evolution in the \"Terminator\" sense of machines turning on their human masters. \u003cbr/\u003eInstead, Vassar biology and cognitive science professor John Long and his students can make changes to the tail of Preyro to see which designs help it avoid the predator robot better.\u003cbr/\u003e \"We're doing the nearest thing we can to building a time machine, which is taking the pieces of the world from 500 million years ago that are interesting to us, building them in the lab and then letting the system go and watching what happens,\" explains Long. \u003cbr/\u003eLong is among a small group of researchers worldwide building robots that can do things like shimmy through water or slither up shores to study biology and evolution. \u003cbr/\u003eThey believe the practice will catch on as technological advances allow robots to mimic animals far better than before. \u003cbr/\u003eMicroprocessors are now tinier and more sophisticated. Building materials are more pliable. \u003cbr/\u003eThe same technology driving the use of electronic prosthetic limbs and vacuuming robots  is giving scientists a sophisticated tool to study animal biology.\u003cbr/\u003ePreviously, Long and his students built Madeleine the swimming robot. Madeleine is roughly the size and shape of a big bed pillow with four flippers sticking from its sides, but it was used to study a 45-ton marine reptile that patrolled the seas in the Jurassic Period.\u003cbr/\u003eThe Preyro robot experiment allows Long to take his evolutionary studies a step farther.\u003cbr/\u003eRobot builders like Long still use computer simulations to complement their work. \u003cbr/\u003eBut Long says swimming robots like Madeleine and Preyro have advantages over computer simulations because it is extremely difficult to simulate the interaction between a flexible solid, like an animal's tail, and a liquid.\u003cbr/\u003e \"With robots you can't violate the laws of physics,\" said Long.  \"By making robots that have a body and that we put into a world, they are being very realistic in ways that its very hard to get a computer programme to be realistic.\" \u003cbr/\u003e Elise Stickles is a student of Professor Long. She is getting a degree in computer programming, but says being able to actually visualise changes in computer code, as opposed to seeing it on a screen, makes all the difference. \u003cbr/\u003e\"With robotics you get to see this sort of real life embodiment of all of your work and effort,\" said Stickles. \"It's a lot of fun.\"\u003cbr/\u003eBy setting up Preyro in a pool with another autonomous robot, a predator named Tadiator, Long and his students simulated an evolutionary scenario. \u003cbr/\u003eThey wanted to examine qualities that would help vertebrate sea creatures of the Cambrian Period forage for food without becoming lunch for predators. \u003cbr/\u003eSpecifically, they wanted to test the hypothesis that the ancient creatures' need to scoot away fast from predators drove the evolution of stiffer tails.\u003cbr/\u003eStudents were able to stiffen Preyro's backbone by fitting plastic rings (representing vertebrae) over its robot's floppy notochord. More rings made for a stiffer tail. \u003cbr/\u003eThe predator, programmed to pursue Preyro, did not evolve.\u003cbr/\u003eThey found that changing the size of Preyro's tail fin had no affect, but backbones stiffened with vertebrae helped Preyro swim away from danger faster. \u003cbr/\u003eSeven vertebra worked the best, any more made the tail too stiff.\u003cbr/\u003eLong says that like the robots, he hopes his project will also evolve.  He plans to make the robots more sophisticated by adding muscle-like fibre to the robot fish and a more complex brain. \u003cbr/\u003eKeyword wacky\u003cbr/\u003e\u003c/span\u003e\n\u003c/div\u003e\n\u003cdiv class='action-container flex justify-between'\u003e\n\u003cbutton aria-expanded='false' aria-label='Read more description' class='rp-full-description' type='button'\u003e\n\u003ci class='fai fa-solid fa-align-left'\u003e\u003c/i\u003e\n\u003cspan id='read_more'\u003eRead More\u003c/span\u003e\n\u003c/button\u003e\n\u003cdiv class='rp-report'\u003e\n\u003c/div\u003e\n\u003c/div\u003e\n\u003cdiv aria-labelledby='resource-details-heading' class='rp-info-section'\u003e\n\u003ch2 class='title' id='resource-details-heading'\u003eResource Details\u003c/h2\u003e\n\u003cdiv class='rp-resource-details clearfix'\u003e\n\u003cdiv class='detail'\u003e\n\u003cdl\u003e\n\u003cdt\u003eCurator Rating\u003c/dt\u003e\n\u003cdd\u003e\u003cspan class=\"star-rating\" aria-label=\"3.5 out of 5 stars\" 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