Interlimb Coordination Mechanism That Exploits Hydrostatic Skeleton Inspired by Wandering Spiders

Abstract

Autonomous decentralized control could be the key to design soft-bodied robots that have a huge number of degrees of freedom. To address this issue, we focus on a wandering spider with a hydrostatic skeleton and aim to understand the decentralized control mechanism underlying their coordination pattern between limbs (i.e., interlimb coordination). For this purpose, we employed an approach wherein we construct a simple mathematical model based on biological insights. We proposed a phenomenological model that can describe fluid dynamics and built a three-dimensional robot model with a simple local reflexive mechanism based on the interaction between flexor muscles and body fluid in their legs. As a first step, we succeeded in reproducing locomotion in which two legs move in anti-phase via simulation.