Dario, Paolo

Grillner, Sten

Ijspeert, Auke

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Auton Robot (2010) 28: 245–246DOI 10.1007/s10514-010-9178-zGuest editorial: special issue on controlof locomotion—from animals to robotsAuke Jan Ijspeert · Paolo Dario · Sten GrillnerReceived: 25 February 2010 / Accepted: 25 February 2010 / Published online: 6 March 2010© Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2010The locomotion skills of current robots are still far behindthose of animals in terms of energy efficiency, flexibility,and agility in complex unstructured terrains. The goal of thisspecial issue of Autonomous Robots is to capture aspectsof the state of the art in locomotion control in biorobotics.These articles present interesting examples of interactionsbetween biology and robotics. They demonstrate how inspi-ration from the animal kingdom can help to improve loco-motion skills in robots, and/or illustrate how robots can beused as scientific tools in animal motor control, e.g. to testhypotheses about neural circuits and biomechanical princi-ples in invertebrate and vertebrate animals.The special issue covers different types of locomotionincluding swimming (Seo, Chung, and Slotine), snake-likecrawling (Hatton and Choset; Wu and Ma), jumping (Ko-vac, Schlegel, Zufferey, and Floreano; Hosoda, Sakaguchi,Takayama and Takuma), quadruped walking (Maufroy,Kimura, and Takase), and biped walking (Iida and Tedrake;Mombaur, Truong, and Laumond).The first article by Seo and colleagues presents a swim-ming turtle robot that is controlled by a central pattern gener-ator (CPG) model composed of a set of coupled oscillators.An interesting contribution of this article is that the oscilla-tors are tightly linked to the mechanics and interact directlythrough the actual states of the actuators (as opposed to theA.J. Ijspeert ()Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, EPFL, Lausanne,Switzerlande-mail: auke.ijspeert@epfl.chP. DarioScuola Superiore Sant’Anna, SSSA, Pisa, ItalyS. GrillnerKarolinska Institute, Stockholm, Swedendesired states). This ensures well synchronized swimminggaits, and robustness against perturbations.Hatton and Choset address the problem of gait generationfor snake robots with many degrees of freedom. They pro-pose a new approach for generating rolling and sidewind-ing gaits that combine ideas from two different approachestraditionally used in snake robotics, namely geometrical ap-proaches and joint angle control approaches. An alternativeapproach based on CPGs is proposed by Wu and Ma. A newnetwork made of Matsuoka oscillators with a feedback con-nection is proposed, which can generate uniform outputswithout any additional adjustment.A novel jumping robot is presented by Kovac and col-leagues. The robot can make impressively high jumps. It hasthe interesting feature that it is capable of recovering pas-sively after landing, orienting itself, and then to jump again.Jumping is also addressed by Hosoda and colleagues usingmuscle-like pneumatic actuators. Using inspiration from thevertebrate musculo-skeletal system, they designed a mono-pod robot that successfully uses bi-articular muscles forcoordinating joints, and mono-articular ones for providingpower for jumping. Pitti, Niiyama, and Kuniyoshi also usemuscle-like actuators to explore the interplay between con-trol, morphology and material. In particular, they present acontrol framework based on phase synchronization to im-plement neuro-modulators that can regulate the coordinationbetween the body and the controllers’ dynamics to differentgait patterns, oscillatory but also discrete.Maufroy and colleagues investigate the problem of pos-ture control in quadruped locomotion. They consider loco-motion at different speeds and present a control frameworkbased on CPGs with the ability to integrate both posture andrhythmic motion controls and shift continuously from onecontrol method to the other according to the walking speed.246 Auton Robot (2010) 28: 245–246The special issue concludes with two articles on bipedlocomotion. Iida and Tedrake present a minimalistic con-trol architecture for a simulated compass-like robot. Theyshow that they can obtain basic walking stability withoutsensory feedback, not only on a flat terrain but also in vari-ous inclined slopes. Finally, Mombaur and colleagues applyinverse optimal control to establish a model of human pathgeneration to given target positions and orientations. The ap-proach is useful not only to identify the underlying optimal-ity criteria of human motions but also to establish optimalcontrol models that can be used to control the locomotion ofthe humanoid HRP2 robot.

Guest editorial: special issue on control oflocomotion—fromanimals to robots

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Guest editorial: special issue on control oflocomotion—fromanimals to robots

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