Emergent design of dynamical behavior

In order to deal with ultra multi degree-of-freedom (DOF) dynamical systems, this paper proposes a design methodology for a control scheme inspired by the concept of emergence in living organisms. With this methodology, specific functions are found to appear in the system only using only local information available to the subcomponents of the system. In order to introduce the advantages of emergence to an ultra multi-DOF dynamical system, we designed the system as an autonomous decentralized system, and controlled its behavior using a bottom-up scheme, i.e., by setting local rules for each DOF. We considered a simplified 242-DOF mass system, with subsystems represented by point masses connected together by linear actuators. We analyzed the behavior of this dynamical system by computer simulation. We applied local rules to connect/disconnect the actuators to realize three kinds of functions: shape maintainability, displacement controllability and energy saving ability. These functions were found to successfully emerge in the numerical simulation results. Hence, the effectiveness of the proposed design methodology is confirmed.