The deep time perspective: How insights from millennia of evolving and extinct animals can inform robot design decision making

Abstract Animals on the visible scale have been experimenting with body form and function in enumerable enviroments for the last 540 million years. Almost all of the variation in the history of life is now gone, leaving only a tiny fraction of what is possible alive in modern animals. Recently biological and engineering techniques have made it possible to robustly answer questions only the fossil record can provide, such as the history and original functions of certain behaviors. Robotics has already begun to champion inspiration from biology, but only from the small variation seen in extant taxa. In this chapter we introduce paleontological study of a now famous source of bioinspiration: The modern African Cheetah. We discuss additional forms of high-speed pursuit predators from the lineage that demonstrate an evolutionary experiment in manuverability on uneven terrain. We also discuss how the evolution of sensing and perception does not always follow or work in concert with the evolution of the musculoskeletal system. We end by summarizing the process of our analysis so that our methods can be repeated for other animals that inspire engineers. We hope this brief primer introduces paleobiology to roboticists and demonstrates the need for biologically inspired robotics to engage with paleobiological processes, to the benefit of both robotics in developing new technology and paleobiology in answering long-standing questions about relationships between extinct forms and their functions.