Abstract
Recently, it has been widely recognized that control and mechanical systems cannot be designed separately due to their tight interdependency. However, there still leaves much to be understood about how the relationship between control and mechanical systems should be. Therefore, as an initial step toward understanding "well-balanced coupling" between control and mechanical systems, this study describes a technique able to analyze the spatiotemporal structure of the dynamics stemming from the interplay among control/mechanical systems and the environment by taking a modular robot as a practical example. Owing to the fact that our modular robot "Slimebot" intrinsically has large degrees of freedom, we have successfully observed an interesting spatiotemporal structure in the interaction dynamics by employing the Navier-Stokes equation.
