BEIJING, March 9 (Xinhuanet) -- European scientists have built a salamander robot to demonstrate how the the first animal from the sea was able to change from swimming to walking and crawl onto land, media reports said Friday.

    The researchers needed 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 team leader Auke Jan Ijspeert of the Ecole Polytechnique Federale in Lausanne, Switzerland.

    First they designed a basic nervous system modeled on a lamprey, a long, primitive eel-like fish. Then that design was altered 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.

    The robot really doesn't look 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 simulate the way a salamander moves.

    Its swimming motion  undulates 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.

    The work, the researchers reported Friday in the journal Science, is "a demonstration of how robots can be used to test biological models, and in return, how biology can help in designing robot locomotion controllers."

    The research was funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation and the French Ministry for Research and Technology.

    (Agencies)