Bacteria-inspired underactuated mobile robot based on a biological fluctuation

Abstract

Interpretation of the living organism's ability to utilize noise from engineering point of view may be beneficial for realizing a simple, yet adaptive, robotic system. This paper presents a bacteria-inspired mobile robot, with a 1-DOF motor and a single sensor. Even with such limitations, the underactuated mobile robot is able to navigate toward a gradient-inducing goal in a two-dimensional space by properly utilizing environmental noise that directly affects its motion. The way the robot utilizes this external noise to control its navigation behavior is interpreted based on biological fluctuation: a simple perspective commonly used to describe how living beings utilize internally generated biological noises.

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

“…The mechanism is inspired from a noise-utilizing behavior found in various scales of biological systems like stochasticity in molecular motors, cell signaling processes, dynamic structure of proteins and recognition in brains [11,12]. Based on the observed dynamics, a simple model was proposed to explain the underlying mechanism by using a dynamical system equation with some attractors [12,[17][18][19][20]. The model was referred to as the attractor selection mechanism (ASM) and represented by Langevin equation as: The potential function U(t) can be designed to have some attractors.…”

“…The GSO approach proposed in the manuscript is based on a coupling between the mechanical dynamics of an embodied system and a control structure known as attractor selection mechanism [11,12,[17][18][19][20]. The mechanism is inspired from a noise-utilizing behavior found in various scales of biological systems like stochasticity in molecular motors, cell signaling processes, dynamic structure of proteins and recognition in brains [11,12].…”

“…Most recently, it is reported that Levy walks in mussels should have evolved through interaction with their environment [16]. Several studies have also been dedicated to understand and model the balance between stochastic behavior in biological systems commonly measured by entropy, and the ability to attenuate the effect of the randomness to reveal potentially useful deterministic dynamics [11][12][13][17][18][19][20].…”

“…The approach taken is to use a mathematical framework known as attractor selection mechanism as the control structure [11,12,[17][18][19][20]. It is hypothesized that by coupling the mechanical dynamics of the body properly with the mechanism, the corresponding embodied system should be able to gracefully switch between random and deterministic behaviors.…”

Decentralization and heterogeneity in complex adaptive systems

“…Third, because even though communication and P2P dynamics play an important role, also heterogeneity in population, and variation of strategies are factors of evolution. These issues can be considered to develop new technical approaches, not only in bio-inspired mobile robotics (Nurzaman et al, 2012) but also in systems oriented to swarm intelligence (Pini et al, 2013).…”