Comparing locomotion of hierarchical distributed autonomous robot

Locomotion is the most important characteristic of living matter. To clarify the factor makes observers find out autonomy in locomotion of living organism is significant from the perspective of artificial intelligence or emergence. In considering physical basis of autonomy of locomotion, we have to remark following three biotic features; “unidirectional movement generated from asymmetric architecture”, “mismatch between objects of apparent locomotion and of endogenous internal activity in the relation of the parts to the whole” and “homeostasis as motive force of internal activity.” In previous study, we have implemented these features to an autonomous distributed robot consisting of several identical modules, which are connected in a linear arrangement and behave in order to resolve the strain of one-self each other. The results of the experiments changing delay time to resolve the strain and the resolving speed showed that the robot shows wide variety of unidirectional locomotion under specific conditions. Therefore, to understand the meaning of the specific conditions, in this study, we logged change of load and angle for each module during the locomotion. Then, we could find that propagations of load and angle change were occurred during long distance locomotion. This means that postponing and passing outstanding problem to neighbors generate large winding propagation and causes baseless locomotion, which is possible to give autonomy.