High-Pass Filtered Positive Feedback. Decentralized Control of Cooperation
Proceedings of the Third European Conference on Advances in Artificial Life
breve: a 3D environment for the simulation of decentralized systems and artificial life
ICAL 2003 Proceedings of the eighth international conference on Artificial life
Hexapod Walking: an expansion to Walknet dealing with leg amputations and force oscillations
Biological Cybernetics
Decentralized Control of Elastic Limbs in Closed Kinematic Chains
International Journal of Robotics Research
A dynamic model of thoracic differentiation for the control of turning in the stick insect
Biological Cybernetics
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In a multilegged walking robot several legs usually have ground contact and thereby form a closed kinematic chain. The control of such a system is generally assumed to require the explicit calculation of the body kinematics. Such a computation requires knowledge concerning all relevant joint angles as well as the segment lengths. Here, we propose a biologically inspired solution that does not need such a body model. This is done by using implicit communication through the body mechanics embodiment and a local positive velocity feedback strategy LPVF on the single joint level. In this control scheme the locally measured joint velocity of an elastic joint is fed into the same joint during the next time step to maintain the movement. At the same time, an additional part of this joint controller observes the mechanical joint power to confine the positive feedback. This solution does not depend on changes of the geometry, e.g. length of individual segments, and allows for a simple solution of negotiation of curves. The principle is tested in a dynamics simulation on a six-legged walker and, for the first time, also on a real robot.