Bioinspired Robots: Examples and the State of the Art

Abstract

Our attempts to mimic animal motion have resulted in many technological advances that have revolutionized how manmade machines move through air, in water, and over land. Despite numerous achievements, engineers and scientists have yet to closely replicate the grace and fluidity of animal movement. This suggests the biological world still has much in the way of suggestions for how to build, design, and program robotic systems whose locomotive capabilities will far outpace what is possible today. The question then becomes: How deeply should we look at biology? Take the transition from snake to snake robot as an example. On the surface, one can see a snake, say, on a hike in the woods and then build an elongated mechanical creature. However, we can go deeper: One can study the fundamental macroscopic principles that can be transferred from muscles and skeleton to conventional motors and mechanical linkages. Going even deeper, one can try to create new muscle-like actuators and controllers based on neural networks in an attempt to accurately copy biological function and control. The right choice of where to focus on this spectrum remains an open question.

To help address these fundamental questions, the biologically inspired robotics community has to date produced many great works, far too many to summarize in one brief article. Instead, we focus the attention of this short comment on what works have specifically inspired our research in the Biorobotics lab at Carnegie Mellon University over the past 20 years. In this time, we have built a number of different robots but are perhaps best known for novel snake-like robots (see http://biorobotics.org).