Locomotion, an essential behavior in our daily life, is generated via emerging self-organized attractors in the complex space of the dynamical system composed of the brain, body, and environment. To elucidate the underlying physical mechanisms of locomotion, an integrated complex systems approach is required. Since the goal is to find the universal physical mechanisms governing locomotion, this crossroad of fields has recently been termed as robophysics (Aguilar et al. 2016). In this context, we have recently proposed to follow a complex dynamical systems approach (Sándor et al. (2015), Martin et. al (2016), Sándor et al. (2018)) called attractoring for studying the physics of robotic locomotion. As an alternative to the more mainstream engineering approaches, we consider self-organized limit-cycle and chaotic attractors as the building blocks for generating motion patterns.
Here we aim to further develop this non-autonomous dynamical systems framework (Sándor et al. (2015), Martin et. al (2016), Sándor et al. (2018)) to:
generate oscillatory or chaotic behaviors for controlling the locomotion of legged robots,
explore the use of multistability in generating self-organized motion primitives by transitioning between them.
For this research, we rely on both analytical calculations, numerical simulations, as well as experimental methods. A similar dynamical systems approach using chaos control has recently been proposed by Steingrube et al. (2010). The novelty of our approach relies on using coexisting stable attractors in contrast to unstable periodic orbits.
Principal investigator: Assist. Prof. Bulcsú Sándor
Mentor: Prof. Zoltán Néda
J Aguilar, et al., A review on locomotion robophysics: the study of movement at the intersection of robotics, soft matter and dynamical systems, Reports on Progress in Physics, 79(11), 110001 (2016)
B Sándor, T Jahn, L Martin, C Gros, The sensorimotor loop as a dynamical system: How regular motion primitives may emerge from self-organized limit cycles, Frontiers in Robotics and AI 2, 31 (2015)
L Martin, B Sándor, C Gros, Closed-loop robots driven by short-term synaptic plasticity: Emergent explorative vs. limit-cycle locomotion, Frontiers in neurorobotics 10, 12 (2016)
F Kubandt, M Nowak, T Koglin, C Gros, B Sándor, Embodied robots driven by self-organized environmental feedback, Adaptive Behavior, 105971231985562 (2019)
B Sándor, M Nowak, T Koglin, L Martin, C Gros, Kick control: using the attracting states arising within the sensorimotor loop of self-organized robots as motor primitives, Frontiers in neurorobotics 12:40 (2018)
T Koglin, B Sándor, C Gros, When the goal is to generate a series of activities: A self-organized simulated robot arm, Plos ONE, 14 (6), e0217004 (2019)
S Steingrube, M Timme, F Wörgötter & P Manoonpong, Self-organized adaptation of a simple neural circuit enables complex robot behaviour, Nature Physics, 6(3), 224–230 (2010)
This work was supported by a grant of the Romanian Ministry of Education and Research, CNCS - UEFISCDI, project number PN-III-P1-1.1-PD-2019-0742, within PNCDI III.