Many invertebrates are ideal model systems on which to base robot design principles due to their success in solving seemingly complex tasks across domains while possessing smaller nervous systems than vertebrates. Three areas are particularly relevant for robot designers: Research on flying and crawling invertebrates has inspired new materials and geometries from which robot bodies (their morphologies) can be constructed, enabling a new generation of softer, smaller, and lighter robots. Research on walking insects has informed the design of new systems for controlling robot bodies (their motion control) and adapting their motion to their environment without costly computational methods. And research combining wet and computational neuroscience with robotic validation methods has revealed the structure and function of core circuits in the insect brain responsible for the navigation and swarming capabilities (their mental faculties) displayed by foraging insects. The last decade has seen significant progress in the application of principles extracted from invertebrates, as well as the application of biomimetic robots to model and better understand how animals function. This Perspectives paper on the past 10 years of the Living Machines conference outlines some of the most exciting recent advances in each of these fields before outlining lessons gleaned andmore »
This article is a historical perspective on how the study of the neuromechanics of insects and other arthropods has inspired the construction, and especially the control, of hexapod robots. Many hexapod robots’ control systems share common features, including: 1. Direction of motor output of each joint (i.e. to flex or extend) in the leg is gated by an oscillatory or bistable gating mechanism; 2. The relative phasing between each joint is influenced by proprioceptive feedback from the periphery (e.g. joint angles, leg load) or central connections between joint controllers; and 3. Behavior can be directed (e.g. transition from walking along a straight path to walking along a curve) via low-dimensional, broadly-acting descending inputs to the network. These distributed control schemes are inspired by, and in some robots, closely mimic the organization of the nervous systems of insects, the natural hexapods, as well as crustaceans. Nearly a century of research has revealed organizational principles such as central pattern generators, the role of proprioceptive feedback in control, and command neurons. These concepts have inspired the control systems of hexapod robots in the past, in which these structures were applied to robot controllers with neuromorphic (i.e. distributed) organization, but not neuromorphic computational more »
- Publication Date:
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10405619
- Journal Name:
- Neuromorphic Computing and Engineering
- Volume:
- 3
- Issue:
- 2
- Page Range or eLocation-ID:
- Article No. 023001
- ISSN:
- 2634-4386
- Publisher:
- IOP Publishing
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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