Abstract
Recently, it has been widely recognized that the mechanical system as well as the control system should be responsible for a certain amount of computation for generating the behavior. However, there still leaves much to be understood about to what extent "computational offloading" from the control system to the mechanical system should be achieved. In order to effectively consider this concept, this study focuses on long-distant physical interaction between body segments as a characteristic physical property of the mechanical system, and discuss its effect from the viewpoint of learning. To this end, we have developed a two-dimensional serpentine robot with monoarticular and biarticular muscles which effectively induce long-distant physical interaction between body segments as a practical example.
