Sprawling Quadruped Robot Driven by Decentralized Control With Cross-Coupled Sensory Feedback Between Legs and Trunk

Quadruped animals achieve agile and highly adaptive locomotion owing to the coordination between their legs and other body parts, such as the trunk, head, and tail, that is, body-limb coordination. This study aims to understand the sensorimotor control underlying body-limb coordination. To this end, we adopted sprawling locomotion in vertebrate animals as a model behavior. This is a quadruped walking gait with lateral body bending used by many amphibians and lizards. Our previous simulation study demonstrated that cross-coupled sensory feedback between the legs and trunk helps to rapidly establish body-limb coordination and improve locomotion performance. This paper presented an experimental validation of the cross-coupled sensory feedback control using a newly developed quadruped robot. The results show similar tendencies to the simulation study. Sensory feedback provides rapid convergence to stable gait, robustness against leg failure, and morphological changes. Our study suggests that sensory feedback potentially plays an essential role in body-limb coordination and provides a robust, sensory-driven control principle for quadruped robots.

Decentralized control with cross-coupled sensory feedback between body and limbs in sprawling locomotion

Auke Ijspeert, Shura Suzuki

Quadrupeds achieve rapid and highly adaptive locomotion owing to the coordination between their legs and other body parts such as their trunk, head, and tail, i.e. body-limb coordination. Therefore, a better understanding of the mechanism underlying body-limb coordination could provide informative insights into the improvement of legged robot mobility. Sprawling locomotion is a walking gait with lateral bending exhibited in primitive legged vertebrates such as salamanders and newts. Because primitive animals are anticipated to possess the essence of quadruped motor control, their locomotion helps better understand body-limb coordination mechanisms. Previous studies modeled neural networks in salamanders and employed it to control robots and investigate and emulate sprawling locomotion. However, these models predefined the relationship between the legs and the trunk, such that how body-limb coordination is attained is largely unknown. In this article, we demonstrate that sensory feedback facilitates body-limb coordination in sprawling locomotion and improves mobility through mathematical modeling and robot simulations. Our proposed model has cross-coupled sensory feedback, that is, bidirectional feedback from body to limb and limb to body, which leads to an appropriate relationship between the legs and the trunk without any predefined relationship. Resulting gaits are similar to the sprawling locomotion of salamanders and achieve high speed and energy efficiency that are at the same level as those of a neural network model, such as conventional models, optimizing the relationship between the legs and the trunk. Furthermore, sensory feedback contributes to the adaptability toward leg failure, and the bidirectionality of feedback facilitates parameter tuning for stable locomotion. These results suggest that cross-coupled sensory feedback facilitates sprawling locomotion and potentially plays an important role in the body-limb coordination mechanism.

IOP PUBLISHING LTD2019

Effects of Facial Emotions on Social-motor Coordination in Schizophrenia

Aude Billard, Laura Bénédicte Marine Cohen, Mahdi Khoramshahi

Schizophrenia patients are known to be impaired in their ability to process social information and to engage in social interactions. To understand better social cognition in schizophrenia, we investigate the links between these impairments. In this paper, we focus primarily on the influence of social feedback, such as facial emotions, on motor coordination during joint action. To investigate and quantify this influence, we exploited systematically-controlled social and nonsocial feedback provided by a humanoid robot. Humanoid robotics technology offers interactive designs and can precisely control the properties of the feedback provided during the interaction. In this work, a joint-action task with a robot is performed to investigate how social cognition is affected by cognitive capabilities and symptomatology. Results show that positive social feedback has a facilitatory effect on social-motor coordination in the control participants compared to nonsocial positive feedback. This facilitation effect is not present in schizophrenia patients, whose social-motor coordination is similar in social and nonsocial feedback conditions. This result is strongly correlated with performances in the Trail Making Test (TMT), which highlights the link between cognitive deficits and social-motor coordination in schizophrenia.

2017

Oncilla robot: a light-weight bio-inspired quadruped robot for fast locomotion in rough terrain

Mostafa Ajallooeian, Auke Ijspeert, Rico Möckel, Alexander Spröwitz, Alexandre Tuleu

: On the hardware level, we are proposing and testing a bio-inspired quadruped robot design (Oncilla robot), based on light-weight, compliant, and three-segmented legs. Our choice of placing the compliance such that it is spanning two joints enforces a non-linear spring stiffness. Based on the SLIP-model assumption, we compare progressive and degressive stiffness proﬁles against a linear-leg stiffness. To facilitate fast and throughout testing also of control approaches we have created a robot model of Oncilla robot in simulation (in Webots [1], a physics-based simulation environment). Here we are presenting new simulation results based on open-loop-central pattern generator (CPG) control and PSOoptimization of the CPG parameters. Our quadruped robot is equipped with passive compliant elements in its legs, and we apply two different strategies to make use of the legs’ compliance during stance phase. This enables us to ﬁnd stable trot gait patterns propelling the robot up to 1 m/s (more than four times the robot’s leg length), depending on the applied stance phase leg-strategy. Different trot gait patterns emerge, and resulting trot gaits are variable in stability (tested as robustness against external perturbations) and speed

2011

Decentralized control with cross-coupled sensory feedback between body and limbs in sprawling locomotion

Auke Ijspeert, Shura Suzuki

IOP PUBLISHING LTD2019