A fully decentralized control of a serpentine robot based on the discrepancy between body, brain and environment

Abstract

Despite its appealing concept, a systematic way of designing autonomous decentralized control system is still lacking. In order to alleviate this, we have so far proposed a design scheme for local sensory feedback control based on so-called discrepancy function that extracts the discrepancies between body (i.e., mechanical system), brain (i.e., control system) and environments. This paper intensively investigates the validity of this design scheme by taking a two-dimensional serpentine robot exhibiting undulatory slithering locomotion as a practical example. Preliminary simulation results derived strongly indicate that our design methodology allows us to endow the robot with highly adaptability and fault tolerance. These results obtained are expected to shed a new light on design methodology for autonomous decentralized control system. Furthermore, together with a validity verification of the simulation results, this paper introduces a real two-dimensional serpentine robot that is currently under development.