Bio-inspired robotics | EPFL Graph Search

Bio-inspired robotic locomotion is a fairly new subcategory of bio-inspired design. It is about learning concepts from nature and applying them to the design of real-world engineered systems. More specifically, this field is about making robots that are inspired by biological systems, including Biomimicry. Biomimicry is copying from nature while bio-inspired design is learning from nature and making a mechanism that is simpler and more effective than the system observed in nature. Biomimicry has led to the development of a different branch of robotics called soft robotics. The biological systems have been optimized for specific tasks according to their habitat. However, they are multifunctional and are not designed for only one specific functionality. Bio-inspired robotics is about studying biological systems, and looking for the mechanisms that may solve a problem in the engineering field. The designer should then try to simplify and enhance that mechanism for the specific task of in

Variable-stiffness tensegrity spine

Enrico Ajanic, Roc Arandes Vilagrasa, Dario Floreano, Davide Zappetti

Vertebrates, including amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals, with their ability to change the stiffness of the spine to increase load-bearing capability or flexibility, have inspired roboticists to develop artificial variable-stiffness spines. However, unlike their natural counterparts, current robotic spine systems do not display robustness or cannot adjust their stiffness according to their task. In this paper, we describe a novel variable-stiffness tensegrity spine, which uses an active mechanism to add or remove a ball-joint constrain among the vertebrae, allowing transition among different stiffness modes: soft mode, global stiff mode, and directional stiff mode. We validate the variable-stiffness properties of the tensegrity spine in experimental bending tests and compare results to a model. Finally, we demonstrate the tensegrity spine system as a continuous variable-stiffness manipulator and highlight its advantages over current systems.

2020

Development of Bio-inspired Underwater Robot with Adaptive Morphology Capable of Multiple Swimming Modes

Dario Floreano, Stefano Mintchev, Thibaut André Pierre Paschal, Jun Shintake

Bio-inspired underwater robots have several benefits compared to traditional underwater vehicles such as agility, efficiency, and an environmentally friendly body. However, the bio-inspired underwater robots developed so far have a single swimming mode, which may limit their capability to perform different tasks. This paper presents a re-configurable bio-inspired underwater robot that changes morphology to enable multiple swimming modes: octopus-mode and fish-mode. The robot is 60 cm long and 50 cm wide, weighing 2.1 kg, and consists of a re-configurable body and 8 compliant arms that are actuated independently by waterproof servomotors. In the robot, the octopus-mode is expected to perform unique tasks such as object manipulation and ground locomotion as demonstrated in literature, while the fish-mode is promising to swim faster and efficiently to travel long distance. With this platform, we investigate effectiveness of adaptive morphology in bio-inspired underwater robots. For this purpose, we evaluate the robot in terms of the cost of transport and the swimming efficiency of both the morphologies. The fish-mode exhibited a lower cost of transport of 2.2 and higher efficiency of 1.2 % compared to the octopus-mode, illustrating the effect of the multiple swimming modes by adaptive morphology.

2017

A hardware-software codesign framework for cellular computing

Pierre-André Mudry

Until recently, the ever-increasing demand of computing power has been met on one hand by increasing the operating frequency of processors and on the other hand by designing architectures capable of exploiting parallelism at the instruction level through hardware mechanisms such as super-scalar execution. However, both these approaches seem to have reached a plateau, mainly due to issues related to design complexity and cost-effectiveness. To face the stabilization of performance of single-threaded processors, the current trend in processor design seems to favor a switch to coarser-grain parallelization, typically at the thread level. In other words, high computational power is achieved not only by a single, very fast and very complex processor, but through the parallel operation of several processors, each executing a different thread. Extrapolating this trend to take into account the vast amount of on-chip hardware resources that will be available in the next few decades (either through further shrinkage of silicon fabrication processes or by the introduction of molecular-scale devices), together with the predicted features of such devices (e.g., the impossibility of global synchronization or higher failure rates), it seems reasonable to foretell that current design techniques will not be able to cope with the requirements of next-generation electronic devices and that novel design tools and programming methods will have to be devised. A tempting source of inspiration to solve the problems implied by a massively parallel organization and inherently error-prone substrates is biology. In fact, living beings possess characteristics, such as robustness to damage and self-organization, which were shown in previous research as interesting to be implemented in hardware. For instance, it was possible to realize relatively simple systems, such as a self-repairing watch. Overall, these bio-inspired approaches seem very promising but their interest for a wider audience is problematic because their heavily hardware-oriented designs lack some of the flexibility achievable with a general purpose processor. In the context of this thesis, we will introduce a processor-grade processing element at the heart of a bio-inspired hardware system. This processor, based on a single-instruction, features some key properties that allow it to maintain the versatility required by the implementation of bio-inspired mechanisms and to realize general computation. We will also demonstrate that the flexibility of such a processor enables it to be evolved so it can be tailored to different types of applications. In the second half of this thesis, we will analyze how the implementation of a large number of these processors can be used on a hardware platform to explore various bio-inspired mechanisms. Based on an extensible platform of many FPGAs, configured as a networked structure of processors, the hardware part of this computing framework is backed by an open library of software components that provides primitives for efficient inter-processor communication and distributed computation. We will show that this dual software–hardware approach allows a very quick exploration of different ways to solve computational problems using bio-inspired techniques. In addition, we also show that the flexibility of our approach allows it to exploit replication as a solution to issues that concern standard embedded applications.

EPFL2009

A hardware-software codesign framework for cellular computing

Pierre-André Mudry

EPFL2009