A self organization approach to goal-directed multimodal locomotion based on Attractor Selection Mechanism

The realization and utilization of multimodal locomotion to enable robots to accomplish useful tasks is a significantly challenging problem in robotics. Related to the challenge, it is crucial to notice that the locomotion dynamics of the robots is a result of interactions between a particular control structure and its body-environment dynamics. From this perspective, this paper presents a simple control structure known as Attractor Selection Mechanism that enables a robot to self organize its multiple locomotion modes for accomplishing a goal-directed locomotion task. Despite the simplicity, the approach enables the robot to automatically explore different body-environment dynamics and stabilize onto particular attractors which corresponds to locomotion modes relevant to accomplish the task. The robot used throughout the paper is a curved-beam hopping robot, which despite its simple actuation method, possesses rich and complex bodyenvironment dynamics.This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from IEEE via http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/ICRA.2015.713990

Power-efficient adaptive behavior through a shape-changing elastic robot

The adaptive morphology of a robot, such as shape adaptation, plays a significant role in adapting its behaviors. Shape adaptation should ideally be achieved without considerable cost, like the power required to deform the robot’s body, and therefore, it is reasonably considered as the last resort in classical rigid robots. However, the last decade has seen an increasing interest in soft robots: robots that can achieve deformability through their inherent material properties or structural compliance. Nevertheless, the dynamics of these types of robots is often complex and therefore it is difficult to substantiate whether the cost like the required power for changing its shape will be worthwhile to achieve the desired behavior. This article presents an approach in the development and analysis of a shape-changing locomoting robot, which relies on the ability of elastic beams to deform and vibrate. Through a proper use of elastic materials and the robot’s vibration-based dynamics, it will be shown both analytically and experimentally how shape adaptation can be designed such that it leads to desirable behaviors, with better power efficiency compared to when the robot solely relies on changing its control input. The results encourage emerging direction in robotics that investigates approaches to change robots’ behaviors through their adaptive morphology. </jats:p

Soft-Material Robotics

There has been a boost of research activities in robotics using soft materials in the past ten years. It is expected that the use and control of soft materials can help realize robotic systems that are safer, cheaper, and more adaptable than the level that the conventional rigid-material robots can achieve. Contrary to a number of existing review and position papers on soft-material robotics, which mostly present case studies and/or discuss trends and challenges, the review focuses on the fundamentals of the research field. First, it gives a definition of softmaterial robotics and introduces its history, which dates back to the late 1970s. Second, it provides characterization of soft-materials, actuators and sensing elements. Third, it presents two general approaches to mathematical modelling of kinematics of soft-material robots; that is, piecewise constant curvature approximation and variable curvature approach, as well as their related statics and dynamics. Fourth, it summarizes control methods that have been used for soft-material robots and other continuum robots in both model-based fashion and model-free fashion. Lastly, applications or potential usage of soft-material robots are described related to wearable robots, medical robots, grasping and manipulation

Morphological adaptation in an energy efficient vibration-based robot

Morphological computation is a concept relevant to robots made of soft and elastic materials. It states that robot's rich dynamics can be exploited to generate desirable behaviors, which can be altered when their morphology is adapted accordingly. This paper presents a low-cost robot made of elastic curved beam driven by a motor, with morphological computation and adaptation ability. Simply by changing robot's shape and the rotating frequency of the motor that vibrates the robot's body, the robot is able to shift its behavior from showing a tendency to slide when it needs to perform tasks like going under confined space, to have more tendency to hop diagonally forward when the robot stands upright. It will also be shown that based on the proposed mechanism, the energy efficiency of the robot locomotion can be maximized

Non-L\'evy mobility patterns of Mexican Me'Phaa peasants searching for fuelwood

We measured mobility patterns that describe walking trajectories of individual Me'Phaa peasants searching and collecting fuelwood in the forests of "La Monta\~na de Guerrero" in Mexico. These one-day excursions typically follow a mixed pattern of nearly-constant steps when individuals displace from their homes towards potential collecting sites and a mixed pattern of steps of different lengths when actually searching for fallen wood in the forest. Displacements in the searching phase seem not to be compatible with L\'evy flights described by power-laws with optimal scaling exponents. These findings however can be interpreted in the light of deterministic searching on heavily degraded landscapes where the interaction of the individuals with their scarce environment produces alternative searching strategies than the expected L\'evy flights. These results have important implications for future management and restoration of degraded forests and the improvement of the ecological services they may provide to their inhabitants.Comment: 15 pages, 4 figures. First version submitted to Human Ecology. The final publication will be available at http://www.springerlink.co

Adaptation of sensor morphology: an integrative view of perception from biologically inspired robotics perspective

Sensor morphology, the morphology of a sensing mechanism which plays a role of shaping the desired response from physical stimuli from surroundings to generate signals usable as sensory information, is one of the key common aspects of sensing processes. This paper presents a structured review of researches on bioinspired sensor morphology implemented in robotic systems, and discusses the fundamental design principles. Based on literature review, we propose two key arguments: first, owing to its synthetic nature, biologically inspired robotics approach is a unique and powerful methodology to understand the role of sensor morphology and how it can evolve and adapt to its task and environment. Second, a consideration of an integrative view of perception by looking into multidisciplinary and overarching mechanisms of sensor morphology adaptation across biology and engineering enables us to extract relevant design principles that are important to extend our understanding of the unfinished concepts in sensing and perceptio

Energy Harvesting in Soft Robot Locomotion with Complex Dynamics

There has been a lot work in the last decade examining the locomotion principles and properties of mobile soft robots. In terms of energy efficiency, it has also been found that most mobile soft robots reported in the literatures are still in need of improvement. Along the direction, a possible approach to increase the energy efficiency is through the ability to harvest the energy used during the locomotion. The main goal of the paper is to investigate the most important principles to harvest energy in soft robot locomotion with complex and rich dynamics. By observing the energy harvesting ability in a vibration induced soft locomotion with complex dynamics, it is found that the ability to harvest higher voltages does not necessarily lead to a higher energy efficiency. Instead, the ability to harvest a proper amount of voltages at a suitable moment is shown to be more important. These primary findings pave the way of maximizing energy efficiency in soft robot locomotion through energy harvesting

Soft-Material Robotics

There has been a boost of research activities in robotics using soft materials in the past ten years. It is expected that the use and control of soft materials can help realize robotic systems that are safer, cheaper, and more adaptable than the level that the conventional rigid-material robots can achieve. Contrary to a number of existing review and position papers on soft-material robotics, which mostly present case studies and/or discuss trends and challenges, the review focuses on the fundamentals of the research field. First, it gives a definition of softmaterial robotics and introduces its history, which dates back to the late 1970s. Second, it provides characterization of soft-materials, actuators and sensing elements. Third, it presents two general approaches to mathematical modelling of kinematics of soft-material robots; that is, piecewise constant curvature approximation and variable curvature approach, as well as their related statics and dynamics. Fourth, it summarizes control methods that have been used for soft-material robots and other continuum robots in both model-based fashion and model-free fashion. Lastly, applications or potential usage of soft-material robots are described related to wearable robots, medical robots, grasping and manipulation

Soft Robotics Education

Robotics education poses a significant challenge because it involves a number of different technological components and disciplines. So far, most of the existing teaching approaches focus on robots with fixed morphologies and rigid structures, which cover only subsets of the entire spectrum of related knowledge. From this perspective, this article explores an application of soft robotics research for robotics education and discusses the challenges and perspectives. We argue that the use of soft materials is crucial for understanding and teaching of a variety of topics related to intelligent adaptive systems. Along with the conceptual discussion, we introduce how the concept can be implemented into practical educational programs and report the latest concrete achievements in our lecture series