Morpho-Rate: a macroscopic evaluation and analysis of the Morpho-Functional Machine

This paper describes an experimental approach of the macroscopic evaluation for the Morpho-Functional Machine. The robotics agent that has many degrees of freedom and large deformability has a difficulty of control, which is how to detect the influence of global body for the feedback signal of local agent. The Amoeba-like-Robot is an example we proposed for the Morpho-Functional Machine. The mathematical model of swarming behavior of multi agents system based on field technique gives a model of the Amoeba-like-Robot. The description of macroscopic observation is proposed and applied for the behavior analysis of Amoeba-like-Robot. The macroscopic observation proposed here suggested to define a so called as Morpho-Rate that consists of the Dynamics of multi agents system. One of the hardware designs of Amoeba-like-Robot consists of a group of distributed agents and is named SMA-net. The SMA-net type is built using a lattice structured field of shape memory alloy (SMA) spring coils, and distributed agents are arranged on all node of the lattice, where each agent includes controller, sensor, indicator and actuator. Based on evidence from performance tests using these proposed architectures we suggested using morpho-rate as design index for the macroscopic evaluation.