Engineers have been building machines with 'extremum seeking' algorithms for decades. Sea urchins perfected the method naturally.
, where the cells move in response to a chemical stimulus. Sea urchin eggs specifically secrete a compound called a sperm-activating peptide, which interacts with the sperm’s flagellum, controlling how it beats. This curves and bends the sperm’s direction on a path toward the egg.
“Sperm don’t have a GPS,” Abdelgalil says. “They don’t know ahead of time where the egg is. So they measure the local concentration [of the peptide] at the current position, then they use that information and move in the direction of increasing concentration levels—which we like to call the direction of the concentration gradient.”
It’s the same for an extremum seeking robot: It doesn’t have coordinates or other information about the target’s location—all it knows is that it can measure and follow the dynamic signal from the current position. Abdelgalil got the idea to look at sea urchin sperm when he saw a previously published paper detailing their behavior under a microscope.
“As soon as I saw the two pictures, I realized that this is more or less the same,” he says. So, in the new study, Abdelgalil and his colleagues illustrated how key components of the sea urchin sperm’s navigation strategy resemble hallmark features of extremum seeking. This extremely effective searching strategy, which evolved over time in nature, could be useful in fine-tuning future system designs and technologies. Extremum seeking algorithms with minimal sensors could help steer miniature robots, like those being tested for targeted drug delivery. Research groups have already explored drug delivery microrobot designs that utilize external signals, Abdelgalil says.
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