A pair of biorobotic pioneers at Case Western Reserve University will lead a five-year, $8 million National Science Foundation (NSF) project to further explore challenges scientists face in making more lifelike and responsive robots, according to a news release.

The project is part of a $50 million endeavor enlisting 70 researchers from four countries to investigate how brains work and interact with their environment. It is funded under NSF's Next Generation Networks for Neuroscience, or NeuroNex, a program that aims to establish international research networks building on existing global investments in neurotechnologies in an effort to understand the brain.

The CWRU project, "NeuroNex: Communication, Coordination, and Control in Neuromechanical Systems (C3NS)," will examine how the nervous system in animals coordinates and controls interactions with the environment, which remains a challenging research problem in neuroscience, according to the release.

Understanding animal movement is crucial for neuroscience because it has implicants for everything from eating to functioning, NSF NeuroNex program director Sridhar Raghavachari said in the release, adding that this is even more important in efforts to create a new generation of robots that can navigate difficult terrain. The C3NS project's multidisciplinary approach benefits neuroscience and robotics simultaneously, Raghavachari said in the release.

"People have been promising lifelike robots for decades and one of the reasons that we're not really there yet is really just the complexity of the world around us," said neuroscientist Hillel Chiel, a professor of biology, neurosciences and biomedical engineering in the College of Arts and Sciences, in a provided statement. "We are focused on creating autonomous devices capable of functioning in the real world, instead of redesigning the environment around them to allow them to move about."

Chiel and roboticist Roger Quinn, the Arthur P. Armington Professor of Engineering and director of the Biorobotics Complex at the Case School of Engineering, will lead the team, which also will include former CWRU researcher Vickie Webster-Wood of Carnegie Mellon, and collaborators from Northwestern University, the University of Michigan, Emory University, West Virginia University and Portland State University, the release stated. According to the NSF, international collaborators from the University of Lincoln in the United Kingdom and the University of Cologne, the University of Jena and the University of Wrzburg in Germany are funded by their home governments.

"Most roboticists try to solve problems with optimization, or with basic design solutions," Quinn said in a provided statement. "But what I've wanted to know is 'How do animals solve these problems?' It's a different way of approaching the problem and there's an animal that has solved just about every engineering problem ever."

The group's submitted plan said the project could "lead to a better understanding of the diversity of life on Earth and may suggest general organizing principles for the nervous system," according to the release. The proposal also indicates the project could also help in the investigation of motor disorders that disrupt locomotion and balance (like Parkinson's) and in the development of neurally-controlled prostheses that can effectively process human neural inputs to more naturally and effectively grasp objects or walk smoothly, according to the release.

NeuroNex is a key part of NSF's participation in the Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies, or BRAIN Initiative, a collaboration across U.S. agencies to advance the understanding of the brain. The other three projects are based at the University of Colorado, Boulder, the University of Texas, Austin, and Yale University.

"The most important questions in neuroscience are so complex they require large teams of researchers with complementary expertise," said Joanne Tornow, NSF assistant director for biological sciences, in a provided statement. "These awards will help us conquer those grand challenges and accelerate profound discoveries about how our brains work."

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CWRU roboticist, neuroscientist to lead $8 million National Science Foundation project - Crain's Cleveland Business