Attractoring


A complex systems framework for the physics of robotic locomotion

Summary

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.

Objectives

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:

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.

Group members

References

Acknowledgement

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.