How should control and body systems be coupled? A robotic case study

Abstract

This study is intended to deal with the interdependency between control and body systems, and to discuss the "relationship as it should be" between these two systems. To this end, a decentralized control of a multi-legged robot is employed as a practical example. The result derived indicates that the convergence of decentralized gait control can be significantly ameliorated by modifying its interaction dynamics between the control system and its body system to be implemented. We also discuss a property expected to emerge under the "well-balanced coupling" particularly from the viewpoint of learning, by borrowing the idea from the "protein folding problem". © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2004.