Abstract
Control of robots has largely been based on the assumption of a fixed morphology. Accordingly, robot designs have been stationary in time, except for the case of modular robots. Any drastic change in morphology, hence, requires a remodelling of the controller. This work takes inspiration from developmental robotics to present a piecewise morphology-controller growth/adaptation strategy that facilitates fast and reliable control adaptation to growing robots. We demonstrate our methodology on a simple 3 degree of freedom walking robot with adjustable foot lengths and with varying inertial conditions. Our results show not only the effectiveness and reliability of the piecewise morphology controller co-adaptation (PMCCA) strategy, but also highlight the need for morphological adaptation as a robot design strategy.
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Hardman, D., George Thuruthel, T., Iida, F. (2020). Towards Growing Robots: A Piecewise Morphology-Controller Co-adaptation Strategy for Legged Locomotion. In: Mohammad, A., Dong, X., Russo, M. (eds) Towards Autonomous Robotic Systems. TAROS 2020. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12228. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-63486-5_37
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-63486-5_37
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