An adaptive decentralized control of a serpentine robot based on the discrepancy between body, brain and environment

Despite its appealing concept, a systematic way of designing autonomous decentralized control system is still lacking. In order to alleviate this, we have so far proposed a design scheme for local sensory feedback control leading to adaptive behaviors from the entire system, based on a so-called discrepancy function that extracts the discrepancies between body (i.e., mechanical system), brain (i.e., control system) and environments. This paper intensively investigates the validity of this design scheme under the real world constraints by taking a two-dimensional serpentine robot exhibiting undulatory slithering locomotion as a practical example. The experimental results show that the robot exhibits adaptive behavior against environmental changes as well as the robustness against malfunctions of body segments due to the local sensory feedback control. The results obtained are expected to shed a new light on methodology for autonomous decentralized control system.