Abstract
Morphology is a defining trait of any walking entity, animal or robot, and is crucial in obtaining movement versatility, dexterity and durability. Collaborations between biologist and engineers create opportunities for implementing bio-inspired morphologies in walking robots. However, there is little guidance for such interdisciplinary collaborations and what tools to use. We propose a development framework for transferring animal morphologies to robots and substantiate it with a replication of the ability of the dung beetle species Scarabaeus galenus to use the same morphology for both locomotion and object manipulation. As such, we demonstrate the advantages of a bio-inspired dung beetle-like robot, ALPHA, and how its morphology outperforms a conventional hexapod by increasing the (1) step length by 50.0%, (2) forward and upward reach by 95.5%, and by lowering the (3) overall motor acceleration by 7.9%, and (4) step frequency by 21.1% at the same walking speed. Thereby, the bio-inspired robot has longer and fewer steps that lower fatigue-inducing impulses, a greater variety of step patterns, and can potentially better utilise its workspace to overcome obstacles. Hence, we demonstrate how the framework can be used to develop legged robots with bio-inspired morphologies that embody greater movement versatility, dexterity and durability.
Highlights
The morphology of walking robots often resembles animals at a high abstraction level with the same number of limbs and placement of body parts
We present a framework for collaborations between biologists and roboticists and demonstrate its bio-inspired development process in a case study that models the morphology and functionality of the dung beetle species Scarabaeus galenus (Figure 2a) with the robot ALPHA (Figure 2b)
This paper proposed a framework for developing bio-inspired morphologies for walking robots and presented a case study that used the framework to develop a dung beetle inspired robot, ALPHA
Summary
The morphology of walking robots often resembles animals at a high abstraction level with the same number of limbs and placement of body parts. Potential benefits of developing such bio-inspired robots include improved movement versatility, dexterity, and durability, as well as other useful features such as using the same limbs for locomotion, grasping, burrowing and object manipulation. The improved understanding from studying animals’ embodied features and testing the differences they enable in robots can benefit research in both biology and engineering. The ability to recreate an animal’s embodied features in a robotic system is a powerful demonstration of the feasibility of the current understanding of the animal’s functional principles. In this spirit, Laughlin, P. et al [1] describes biologists’ tasks as reverse-engineering studies: asking both how an animal trait
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