17,112 research outputs found
Constructing living buildings: a review of relevant technologies for a novel application of biohybrid robotics
Biohybrid robotics takes an engineering approach to the expansion and exploitation of biological behaviours for application to automated tasks. Here, we identify the construction of living buildings and infrastructure as a high-potential application domain for biohybrid robotics, and review technological advances relevant to its future development. Construction, civil infrastructure maintenance and building occupancy in the last decades have comprised a major portion of economic production, energy consumption and carbon emissions. Integrating biological organisms into automated construction tasks and permanent building components therefore has high potential for impact. Live materials can provide several advantages over standard synthetic construction materials, including self-repair of damage, increase rather than degradation of structural performance over time, resilience to corrosive environments, support of biodiversity, and mitigation of urban heat islands. Here, we review relevant technologies, which are currently disparate. They span robotics, self-organizing systems, artificial life, construction automation, structural engineering, architecture, bioengineering, biomaterials, and molecular and cellular biology. In these disciplines, developments relevant to biohybrid construction and living buildings are in the early stages, and typically are not exchanged between disciplines. We, therefore, consider this review useful to the future development of biohybrid engineering for this highly interdisciplinary application.publishe
Multiple chaotic central pattern generators with learning for legged locomotion and malfunction compensation
An originally chaotic system can be controlled into various periodic
dynamics. When it is implemented into a legged robot's locomotion control as a
central pattern generator (CPG), sophisticated gait patterns arise so that the
robot can perform various walking behaviors. However, such a single chaotic CPG
controller has difficulties dealing with leg malfunction. Specifically, in the
scenarios presented here, its movement permanently deviates from the desired
trajectory. To address this problem, we extend the single chaotic CPG to
multiple CPGs with learning. The learning mechanism is based on a simulated
annealing algorithm. In a normal situation, the CPGs synchronize and their
dynamics are identical. With leg malfunction or disability, the CPGs lose
synchronization leading to independent dynamics. In this case, the learning
mechanism is applied to automatically adjust the remaining legs' oscillation
frequencies so that the robot adapts its locomotion to deal with the
malfunction. As a consequence, the trajectory produced by the multiple chaotic
CPGs resembles the original trajectory far better than the one produced by only
a single CPG. The performance of the system is evaluated first in a physical
simulation of a quadruped as well as a hexapod robot and finally in a real
six-legged walking machine called AMOSII. The experimental results presented
here reveal that using multiple CPGs with learning is an effective approach for
adaptive locomotion generation where, for instance, different body parts have
to perform independent movements for malfunction compensation.Comment: 48 pages, 16 figures, Information Sciences 201
A short curriculum of the robotics and technology of computer lab
Our research Lab is directed by Prof. Anton Civit. It is an interdisciplinary group of 23
researchers that carry out their teaching and researching labor at the Escuela
Politécnica Superior (Higher Polytechnic School) and the Escuela de Ingeniería
Informática (Computer Engineering School). The main research fields are: a)
Industrial and mobile Robotics, b) Neuro-inspired processing using electronic spikes,
c) Embedded and real-time systems, d) Parallel and massive processing computer
architecture, d) Information Technologies for rehabilitation, handicapped and elder
people, e) Web accessibility and usability
In this paper, the Lab history is presented and its main publications and research
projects over the last few years are summarized.Nuestro grupo de investigación está liderado por el profesor Civit. Somos un grupo
multidisciplinar de 23 investigadores que realizan su labor docente e investigadora
en la Escuela Politécnica Superior y en Escuela de Ingeniería Informática. Las
principales líneas de investigaciones son: a) Robótica industrial y móvil. b)
Procesamiento neuro-inspirado basado en pulsos electrónicos. c) Sistemas
empotrados y de tiempo real. d) Arquitecturas paralelas y de procesamiento masivo.
e) Tecnología de la información aplicada a la discapacidad, rehabilitación y a las
personas mayores. f) Usabilidad y accesibilidad Web.
En este artículo se reseña la historia del grupo y se resumen las principales
publicaciones y proyectos que ha conseguido en los últimos años
Rapid inversion: running animals and robots swing like a pendulum under ledges.
Escaping from predators often demands that animals rapidly negotiate complex environments. The smallest animals attain relatively fast speeds with high frequency leg cycling, wing flapping or body undulations, but absolute speeds are slow compared to larger animals. Instead, small animals benefit from the advantages of enhanced maneuverability in part due to scaling. Here, we report a novel behavior in small, legged runners that may facilitate their escape by disappearance from predators. We video recorded cockroaches and geckos rapidly running up an incline toward a ledge, digitized their motion and created a simple model to generalize the behavior. Both species ran rapidly at 12-15 body lengths-per-second toward the ledge without braking, dove off the ledge, attached their feet by claws like a grappling hook, and used a pendulum-like motion that can exceed one meter-per-second to swing around to an inverted position under the ledge, out of sight. We discovered geckos in Southeast Asia can execute this escape behavior in the field. Quantification of these acrobatic behaviors provides biological inspiration toward the design of small, highly mobile search-and-rescue robots that can assist us during natural and human-made disasters. We report the first steps toward this new capability in a small, hexapedal robot
A SpiNNaker Application: Design, Implementation and Validation of SCPGs
In this paper, we present the numerical results of the implementation
of a Spiking Central Pattern Generator (SCPG) on a SpiNNaker
board. The SCPG is a network of current-based leaky integrateand-
fire (LIF) neurons, which generates periodic spike trains that correspond
to different locomotion gaits (i.e. walk, trot, run). To generate
such patterns, the SCPG has been configured with different topologies,
and its parameters have been experimentally estimated. To validate our
designs, we have implemented them on the SpiNNaker board using PyNN
and we have embedded it on a hexapod robot. The system includes a
Dynamic Vision Sensor system able to command a pattern to the robot
depending on the frequency of the events fired. The more activity the
DVS produces, the faster that the pattern that is commanded will be.Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad TEC2016-77785-
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