Guided Self-Organization in a Dynamic Embodied System Based on Attractor Selection Mechanism

Surya Nurzaman,Fumiya Iida,Yongjae Kim,Xiaoxiang Yu

doi:10.3390/e16052592

Abstract

Guided self-organization can be regarded as a paradigm proposed to understand how to guide a self-organizing system towards desirable behaviors, while maintaining its non-deterministic dynamics with emergent features. It is, however, not a trivial problem to guide the self-organizing behavior of physically embodied systems like robots, as the behavioral dynamics are results of interactions among their controller, mechanical dynamics of the body, and the environment. This paper presents a guided self-organization approach for dynamic robots based on a coupling between the system mechanical dynamics with an internal control structure known as the attractor selection mechanism. The mechanism enables the robot to gracefully shift between random and deterministic behaviors, represented by a number of attractors, depending on internally generated stochastic perturbation and sensory input. The robot used in this paper is a simulated curved beam hopping robot: a system with a variety of mechanical dynamics which depends on its actuation frequencies. Despite the simplicity of the approach, it will be shown how the approach regulates the probability of the robot to reach a goal through the interplay among the sensory input, the level of inherent stochastic perturbation, i.e., noise, and the mechanical dynamics.

Highlights

A self-organizing system is characterized by several fundamental properties: the capability to create a globally coherent pattern out of local interactions, resilience to changes in the operating enviroment, as well as non-deterministic spontaneous dynamics
We present an approach to guide the self-organization of an embodied system by coupling the mechanical dynamics of the system with an internal control structure known as attractor selection mechanism (ASM)
The embodied system used in this paper is a simulated curved beam hopping robot: a system with a variety of mechanical dynamics which solely depends on its actuation frequencies

Summary

Introduction

A self-organizing system is characterized by several fundamental properties: the capability to create a globally coherent pattern out of local interactions, resilience to changes in the operating enviroment, as well as non-deterministic spontaneous dynamics. In an engineered dynamical system, realization of a particular behavior is commonly achieved through a methodical step by step planning process with predictable outcomes. Guided self-organization (GSO) is a paradigm proposed to combine these two approaches for generating behaviors in a favorable way, i.e., how a self-organizing system can be guided to have desirable behaviors without eliminating its fundamental properties such as non-deterministic dynamics with emergent features [1,2]. Recent approaches of GSO based on the principle of homeokinesis have gained a lot of attention [2,6]

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