Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Department of Informatics, University of Zurich Zurich, Switzerland ; Bio-inspired Robotics Laboratory, Department of Mechanical and Process Engineering ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland.
Front Comput Neurosci. 2013 Jul 9;7:91. doi: 10.3389/fncom.2013.00091. eCollection 2013.
The behaviors of the animals or embodied agents are characterized by the dynamic coupling between the brain, the body, and the environment. This implies that control, which is conventionally thought to be handled by the brain or a controller, can partially be outsourced to the physical body and the interaction with the environment. This idea has been demonstrated in a number of recently constructed robots, in particular from the field of "soft robotics". Soft robots are made of a soft material introducing high-dimensionality, non-linearity, and elasticity, which often makes the robots difficult to control. Biological systems such as the octopus are mastering their complex bodies in highly sophisticated manners by capitalizing on their body dynamics. We will demonstrate that the structure of the octopus arm cannot only be exploited for generating behavior but also, in a sense, as a computational resource. By using a soft robotic arm inspired by the octopus we show in a number of experiments how control is partially incorporated into the physical arm's dynamics and how the arm's dynamics can be exploited to approximate non-linear dynamical systems and embed non-linear limit cycles. Future application scenarios as well as the implications of the results for the octopus biology are also discussed.
动物或实体代理的行为特征是大脑、身体和环境之间的动态耦合。这意味着，控制（传统上被认为是由大脑或控制器处理的）可以部分外包给物理身体和与环境的相互作用。这个想法已经在一些最近构建的机器人中得到了证明，特别是在“软机器人”领域。软机器人由柔软的材料制成，引入了高维度、非线性和弹性，这往往使机器人难以控制。像章鱼这样的生物系统通过利用其身体动力学以高度复杂的方式来掌握其复杂的身体。我们将证明章鱼手臂的结构不仅可以用来产生行为，而且在某种意义上可以作为一种计算资源。通过使用受章鱼启发的软机器臂，我们在一系列实验中展示了控制是如何部分地纳入物理臂的动力学的，以及臂的动力学是如何被利用来近似非线性动力系统并嵌入非线性极限环的。还讨论了未来的应用场景以及这些结果对章鱼生物学的影响。
