Abstract
This paper presents a soft-bodied amoeboid robot inspired by true slime mold. Significant features of this robot are twofold: (1) the robot has highly soft and deformable body stemming from real-time tunable springs and a balloon, the former is utilized as an outer skin of the body and the latter serves as protoplasm; and (2) a fully decentralized control using coupled oscillators with completely local sensory feedback mechanism is realized by exploiting the long-distance interaction between the body parts stemming from the law of conservation of protoplasmic mass. Experimental results show that this robot exhibits highly supple locomotion without relying on any hierarchical structure. The results obtained are expected to shed a new light on design methodology for autonomous decentralized control system.
