Haberland M, Kim S
Biomimetic Robotics Lab, MIT, 77 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA.
Bioinspir Biomim. 2015 Feb 2;10(1):016010. doi: 10.1088/1748-3190/10/1/016010.
When millions of years of evolution suggest a particular design solution, we may be tempted to abandon traditional design methods and copy the biological example. However, biological solutions do not often translate directly into the engineering domain, and even when they do, copying eliminates the opportunity to improve. A better approach is to extract design principles relevant to the task of interest, incorporate them in engineering designs, and vet these candidates against others. This paper presents the first general framework for determining whether biologically inspired relationships between design input variables and output objectives and constraints are applicable to a variety of engineering systems. Using optimization and statistics to generalize the results beyond a particular system, the framework overcomes shortcomings observed of ad hoc methods, particularly those used in the challenging study of legged locomotion. The utility of the framework is demonstrated in a case study of the relative running efficiency of rotary-kneed and telescoping-legged robots.
当数百万年的进化暗示了一种特定的设计解决方案时，我们可能会倾向于放弃传统的设计方法，转而模仿生物学实例。然而，生物学解决方案并不常常能直接转化到工程领域，即便能够转化，模仿也会消除改进的机会。更好的方法是提取与感兴趣的任务相关的设计原则，将其融入工程设计中，并与其他方案一起检验这些候选方案。本文提出了首个通用框架，用于确定设计输入变量与输出目标及约束之间受生物启发的关系是否适用于各种工程系统。该框架利用优化和统计方法将结果推广到特定系统之外，克服了临时方法所存在的缺点，尤其是在有挑战性的腿部运动研究中所使用的那些方法。在一个关于旋转膝关节机器人和伸缩腿机器人相对运行效率的案例研究中，展示了该框架的实用性。
