ヘビ型ロボットにおける「手応え制御則」の実機検証

抄録

Snakes actively utilize terrain irregularities and move effectively by pushing their body against the scaffolds that they encounter. Clarifying the underlying mechanism will help develop robots that can work well in unstructured real-world environments. Although several studies have been conducted to reproduce the above behavior with robots, they still had a problem that the robots could not move effectively depending on the alignment of pegs. To address this issue, we previously proposed an autonomous decentralized control scheme based on TEGOTAE, a Japanese concept describing how well a perceived reaction matches an expectation. In this scheme, reaction forces from environment are evaluated in real time and those beneficial for propulsion of the body are selectively exploited. In this paper, we performed experiments using a snake-like robot to investigate the validity of the proposed control scheme.