Editorial: Recent Trends in Morphological Computation

Abstract

Editorial on the Research Topic Recent Trends in Morphological ComputationMorphological Computation is a concept that suggests that morphological properties, such as the shape and form of a body, as well as dynamical properties like compliance, resonance, and friction, play a crucial role in the emergence of intelligent behavior in nature. Many biological systems appear to have found clever ways to exploit morphological features of their bodies to improve interaction with their environment. As a result, important functions like sensing, control or even computation are partly outsourced to the body's morphology. This, in turn, enables biological systems to be extremely robust, energy efficient, and highly adaptive. Clearly, these are all properties that are very desirable for robotics systems as well, especially, if they should operate in complex and noisy environments.While the role of morphological features in biological systems is well accepted, so far, the translation and application of this concept to robotics remains underexplored. One of the main reasons is that the emphasis on the body as a resource for functionality is in stark contrast to the currently dominating design and control paradigms in robotics, where the body is seen as something that needs to be dominated. The robot's morphology is seen as part of the problem rather than part of the solution. Current robotic systems use rigid body parts and high torque servo motors to suppress any undesirable morphological behaviors like nonlinearity, underactuation or noise (Hauser et al., 2014). The motivation is that rigid bodies can be captured by very simple models and, therefore, can be easily controlled. However, at the same time this method of robot design might overlook the potential for embedding beneficial functionalities within the body and it overrides any natural movements by using a large amount of energy.Remarkably, these same complex morphological properties that are avoided in conventional robotic designs often play a key role in the behavior of natural systems, many of which outperform state-of-theart robots in many real-world tasks. Indeed, the only place where modern robotics systems are better than their biological counterparts is in high precision and fast movements in highly controlled environments like factory floors or research labs. Outside of these conditions, e.g., in our working and living spaces, current robotics design mostly fail. Hence, there is a huge potential for novel robotics systems that, besides the use of digital computational power in form of Artificial Intelligence, use their morphological features to make them more intelligent through Morphological Computation.Recently, the concept has gained an increased interest due to several technological leaps and the emergent of novel research fields. On one hand additive manufacturing has accelerated and multiplied the possibilities of materials that can be used with 3D printing technology. This is partly also driven by the recent emergence of the field of Soft Robotics, whic...

Embodied Intelligence & Morphological Computation in Soft Robotics Community: Collaborations, Coordination, and Perspective

“…Such bodies can be pre-designed, initiate in a general state to adapt to the task and environment, or even grow to a final robust shape while adapting to their environment, as for the living creatures. These are in contrast with the traditional robotics that the robot embodiment and natural behaviour are part of the problem to be overcome by high energy actuation and computationally expensive control units [10].…”

“…In other words, the brain and the body should work together to overcome challenges of our unstructured world to achieve extremely robust, energy efficient, and highly adaptive robots similar to biological systems [10]. This hints interesting paradigms for • Embodied intelligence (EI), "investigating tight coupling between an agent body and brain" [11],…”

“…• Physical intelligence (PI), "physically encoding sensing, actuation, control, memory, logic, computation, adaptation, learning and decision-making into the body of an agent" [11], and • Morphological Computation (MC), "outsourcing part of control, sensing and computation tasks to the robot body to be handled through emergence of functional behaviours due to properties such as architectured kinematics, compliance, natural resonance, damping and friction" [10].…”

Directionally Compliant Legs Enabling Crevasse Traversal in Small Ground‐Based Robots

“…[ 10,18 ] All of the above examples make use of morphological computation, which involves “outsourcing part of control, sensing and computation tasks to the robot body to be handled through emergence of functional behaviours due to properties such as architectured kinematics, compliance, natural resonance, damping and friction”. [ 19 ] In this way, control and actuation complexity can be reduced through body design.…”

“…[ 27 ] This type of strategy falls in the general category of morphological computation, where the mechanism for body shape change in response to environmental conditions is embedded into the body of the robot. [ 19 ] This approach can allow robots to use simple, open‐loop strategies to passively adjust to variable terrain features without the need for complex sensing or control. [ 17 ]…”