Yasui Kotaro, Sakai Kazuhiko, Kano Takeshi, Owaki Dai, Ishiguro Akio
Research Institute of Electrical Communication, Tohoku University, Sendai, Miyagi, Japan.
Japan Science and Technology Agency, CREST, Kawaguchi, Saitama, Japan.
PLoS One. 2017 Feb 2;12(2):e0171421. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0171421. eCollection 2017.
Recently, myriapods have attracted the attention of engineers because mobile robots that mimic them potentially have the capability of producing highly stable, adaptive, and resilient behaviors. The major challenge here is to develop a control scheme that can coordinate their numerous legs in real time, and an autonomous decentralized control could be the key to solve this problem. Therefore, we focus on real centipedes and aim to design a decentralized control scheme for myriapod robots by drawing inspiration from behavioral experiments on centipede locomotion under unusual conditions. In the behavioral experiments, we observed the response to the removal of a part of the terrain and to amputation of several legs. Further, we determined that the ground reaction force is significant for generating rhythmic leg movements; the motion of each leg is likely affected by a sensory input from its neighboring legs. Thus, we constructed a two-dimensional model wherein a simple local reflexive mechanism was implemented in each leg. We performed simulations by using this model and demonstrated that the myriapod robot could move adaptively to changes in the environment and body properties. Our findings will shed new light on designing adaptive and resilient myriapod robots that can function under various circumstances.
最近，多足动物吸引了工程师们的关注，因为模仿它们的移动机器人可能具有产生高度稳定、适应性强和有弹性行为的能力。这里的主要挑战是开发一种能够实时协调其众多腿部的控制方案，而自主分散控制可能是解决这个问题的关键。因此，我们专注于真正的蜈蚣，并旨在通过从异常条件下蜈蚣运动的行为实验中汲取灵感，为多足机器人设计一种分散控制方案。在行为实验中，我们观察了对部分地形移除和几条腿截肢的反应。此外，我们确定地面反作用力对于产生有节奏的腿部运动很重要；每条腿的运动可能受到来自其相邻腿部的感觉输入的影响。因此，我们构建了一个二维模型，其中在每条腿中实现了一个简单的局部反射机制。我们使用这个模型进行了模拟，并证明多足机器人可以自适应地应对环境和身体属性的变化。我们的发现将为设计能够在各种情况下发挥作用的适应性强和有弹性的多足机器人提供新的思路。
