Abstract
Locomotion in animals provides a model for adaptive behavior as it is able to deal with various kinds of perturbations. Work in insects suggests that this evolved flexibility results from a modular architecture, which can be characterized by a recurrent neural network allowing for various emerging attractor states. Whereas a lower control-level coordinates joint movements on a short timescale, a higher-level handles action selection on longer timescales. Implementation of such a control system on a walking hexapod robot was able to deal with various walking patterns including disturbances such as uneven terrain or loss of a leg. Here, we propose a cognitive expansion to the adaptive control system that allows dealing with novel challenging situations. This approach makes use of an internal simulation-based planner that is triggered when the model-free controller fails to recover from an unstable pose. Using a grounded internal body model, the planner then tries, in internal simulation, different solutions out of context, and thus, proposes a new plan to be executed on the real robot. We demonstrate the feasibility of this control approach for walking over terrain with uncertain footholds in three scenarios.
Highlights
A DAPTIVITY characterizes the behavior of animals to effectively deal with disturbances and variations [1].Manuscript received February 26, 2021; revised May 26, 2021 and June 1, 2021; accepted July 23, 2021
The results demonstrate that the extremely decentralized architecture, which is known to be well suited for an adaptive controller, is well suited to support a cognitive system as this architecture enables the cognitive expansion to safely choose between and test many small motor primitives out of context in internal simulation
This solution is simpler, as it requires less computational load and is much faster. Such a reactive architecture allows for coping with difficult starting positions, different velocities [58], walking directions [59], and negotiating curves (e.g., [32]). Such a system has been extended by additional motor primitives in order to solve a seemingly complex task as climbing over a large gap the size of the own body, which is only limited by the morphological constraints of body and legs [60]
Summary
A DAPTIVITY characterizes the behavior of animals to effectively deal with disturbances and variations [1]. Manuscript received February 26, 2021; revised May 26, 2021 and June 1, 2021; accepted July 23, 2021. Date of publication; date of current version. This paper was recommended for publication by Associate Editor M. Yoshida upon evaluation of the reviewers’ comments. Yoshida upon evaluation of the reviewers’ comments. (Corresponding author: Malte Schilling.)
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