Abstract
Although physical interaction between individual components plays an important role in autonomous decentralized control systems, a systematic way of designing it is still lacking. To alleviate this, we focus on the locomotion of earthworms, and propose a design scheme based on the physical locomotion using a continuum model, and we derive an optimal force distribution that enables efficient locomotion. We propose a decentralized control scheme on the basis of the optimal force distribution, and we investigate its validity by simulations. The simulation results show that the proposed control scheme allows the robot to locomote efficiently.
