Abstract
Autonomous decentralized control is a key concept for understanding the mechanism underlying adaptive and versatile behavior of animals. Although the design methodology of decentralized control based on coupled oscillators has been proposed in previous studies, it cannot reproduce behavioral versatility of animals comprehensively. Therefore, our objective is to understand the behavioral versatility by focusing on ophiuroids as simple "best" model living organisms that exhibit spontaneous role assignment of rhythmic and non-rhythmic arm movements. We have previously modeled such movements using an active rotator model that can describe both oscillatory and excitatory properties. In this paper, we develop a real physical ophiuroid robot based on the proposal model, and we show by experiments that the robot successfully realizes omnidirectional locomotion with spontaneous role assignment of rhythmic and non-rhythmic arm movements.
