Biologically inspired control of a simulated octopus ARM via recurrent neural networks

  • Authors:
  • Kohei Nakajima;Tao Li;Naveen Kuppuswamy;Rolf Pfeifer

  • Affiliations:
  • University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland;University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland;University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland;University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 13th annual conference companion on Genetic and evolutionary computation
  • Year:
  • 2011

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Abstract

The aim of this study is to explore a control architecture that can control a soft and "exible octopus-like arm for an object reaching task. Inspired by the division of functionality between the central and peripheral nervous systems of a real octopus, we discuss that the important factor of the control is not to regulate the arm muscles one by one but rather to control them globally with appropriate timing, and we propose an architecture equipped with a recurrent neural network (RNN). By setting the task environment for the reaching behavior, and training the network with an incremental learning strategy, we evaluate whether the network is then able to achieve the reaching behavior or not. As a result, we show that the RNN can successfully achieve the reaching behavior, exploiting the physical dynamics of the arm due to the timing-based control.