Robot-Inspired Biology: The Compound-Wave Control Template

Abstract

Biologically inspired robots perform many interesting and useful behaviors, but to effectively emulate their biological counterparts, robots often need to possess many degrees of freedom, complicating their mechanical design and making it difficult to apply standard control and motion planning strategies. To address this complexity, the robotics community has derived low-dimensional parameter-based controllers that naturally coordinate many degrees of freedom such as the serpenoid curves used to control snake robots. Controllers utilizing this parameterization for snake robots have been able to induce behaviors similar to that of the robots' biological counterparts. A similar concept, called a control template, is used in the study of animal movements. However, much of the prior work on control templates has been limited to in-plane motion. In this work, we extend the usage of control templates to three dimensions to both better model and understand biology, as well as to help us gain better intuition into how we can use pre-existing control paradigms to create new behaviors for biologically inspired robots.