Artificial Bivalves – The Biomimetics of Underwater Burrowing

Biomimetics is a fruitful combination of biology and engineering, leading not only to technological innovations but also new insights into biological questions. In this ongoing project, embodied artificial intelligence (embodied AI), artificial evolution and palaeontology are combined to investigate the functional morphology of bivalves. This cross-fertilization allows to expand biomimetics from current biological systems to the whole evolutionary history and to apply the synthetic approach common in embodied AI as a method to tackle open palaeontological questions. So far, a robotic platform has been built to mimic the burrowing technique applied by bivalves. First results show interesting insights into underwater burrowing. We plan to build a more complex version of the system and to perform evolutionary robotics experiments.