Development of neural oscillator based motion control system and applied to snake-like robot

Abstract

Robot are expect to be new tools for the operations and observations in the extreme environments where human has difficulties for accessing directly, deep ocean, space, nuclear plants and so on. One of the important matter to realize mobile robots for extreme environments are to establish systems in tbe movement and their structures which are strong enough to disturbance and breakdowns. A solution to develop robust robot systems are to learn and imitate biological systems. For example, in the spinal cord of animals, neural oscillator systems called Central Pattern Generator (CPG) are proven to exist and investigated that CPG control rhythmical signals such as swimming pattern, walking locomotion, heart beats, etc. In this paper, neural oscillator based motion control system was developed using micro-computer PIC, and applied to motion control of snake-like robot. The robot can move forwards, backwards by changing weights and change direction by adjusting command parameters from the upper layer.