Abstract
In the dynamic environment, how the robot can be controlled is an important issue. Robot would be surrounded by lots of energy flows. Such energy flows are often oscillatory and there are regularity. In spite of the absence of neural circuits, simple living organisms such as amoebas show homeostatic behavior against such energy flows. This is because amoebas are constructed as oscillator aggregation and they can be synchronized with oscillating objectives and some regular motions. In this study, the amoeba-like dynamics was focused as a possible mechanism to control the robot body motion fit for the purpose to stabilize relationship between robot and environment by synchronization. We proposed an oscillator aggregation based robot control mechanism to synchronize with oscillating objects in the external environment by using coupling van der Pol oscillators with a stochastic perturbation. In the real robot experiment, the robot demonstrated to maintain the own internal activity fit for the movement of external objects as a result of the synchronization, which was evaluated in the multivariate multiscale entropy analysis as an index of the degree of synchronization in complex cases. Synchronization and protective behavior observed in this experiment suggest a possible adaptability or autonomy of the robot to synchronize dynamical behaviors in the external environment as an emergence of homeostasis.
