Abstract
A virtual elastic robot is proposed which has a body with multiple degrees of freedom. It is capable of fitting its body to the given surrounding environment. The intended robot is modeled by rigid objects connected by spring joints in a circular structure. Its control system manipulates spring actuators to realize elastic movements. This paper aims to acquire its control system for the robot to behave autonomously to adapt to various circumstances. A physical simulation is done to achieve given tasks for the elastic robot. The simulation result shows that the elastic robot achieve a simple locomotion task. Moreover, we conduct a learning experiment to adapt the robot to a complicated circumstance, in which an obstacle is placed. In order to allow the robot to adapt to there, we propose a composite behavior which consists of simple behaviors. The simulation results in forming a behavioral pattern of autonomous locomotion.
