The two greatest human impacts on the Earth are the transformation of natural habitat into industrial landscape and climate change. Our ability to predict how communities of organisms will respond to such disturbances depends on being able to understand how biotic and abiotic interactions influence the survival of individual animals. This talk presents new tools and approaches to quantitatively characterize behavioral variation in biomechanical performance in the real world. This information informs the design of bio-inspired robotic models that emulate current, extinct, and theoretical forms and are used in robot-animal interaction experiments to probe the fundamental biomechanical principles shaping the evolution of animal movement over millions of years. By examining the biomechanics of motions in complex environments, we are better able to predict animal response to ecosystem disturbance. In addition, we are able to design robots capable of successful operation in real-world environments.

Talia Y. Moore is an Assistant Research Scientist in the Robotics Institute at the University of Michigan. She develops tools to enable the quantitative characterization of behavioral variation in animal movement in real-world environments and applies her findings to the design of bio-inspired robots that are used to test evolutionary hypotheses. Dr. Moore is an Associate Editor for International Conference for Biomedical Robotics and Biomechatronics and is a member of IEEE, the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology, and the Society for the Study of Evolution. She received a PhD in Organismic and Evolutionary Biology from Harvard University in 2016.