Modular Neural Control for Bio-Inspired Walking and Ball Rolling of a Dung Beetle-Like Robot

Abstract

Dung beetles can perform impressive multiple motor behaviors using their legs. The behaviors include walking and rolling a large dung ball on different terrains, e.g., level ground and different slopes. To achieve such complex behaviors for legged robots, we propose here a modular neural controller for dung beetle-like locomotion and object transportation behaviors of a dung beetle-like robot. The modular controller consists of several modules based on three generic neural modules. The main modules include 1) a neural oscillator network module (as a central pattern generator (CPG)), 2) a neural CPG postprocessing module (PCPG), 3) a velocity regulating network module (VRN). The CPG generates basic rhythmic patterns. The patterns are first shaped by the PCPG and their amplitudes as well as phases are later modified by the VRN to obtain proper motor patterns for locomotion and object transportation. Combining all these neural modules, we can achieve different motor patterns for four different actions which are forward walking, backward walking, levelground ball rolling, and sloped-ground ball rolling. All these actions can be activated by four input neurons. The experimental results show that the simulated dung beetle-like robot can robustly perform the actions. The average forward speed is 0.058 cm/s and the robot is able to roll a large ball (about 3 times of its body height and 2 times of its weight) up different slope angles up to 25 degrees.

Legged robots for object manipulation: A review

“…One way effective friction can be reduced is if the object can be rolled. The dung beetle robot can use two front legs to walk backward on different terrains while using the middle and hind legs to stabilize and manipulate a large ball (Leung et al, 2018;Thor et al, 2018;Billeschou et al, 2020). Although only validated in simulation, an interesting example is the dual MPC-based approach described in Yang C. et al (2020b), where a quadruped robot stands on top of a large ball and rolls it to transport itself and the ball.…”

Insect-Inspired Robots: Bridging Biological and Artificial Systems

“…The choice of hexapod design is strongly motivated by the need for insectoid robots to mimic the animal model as far as possible, so that the results obtained from experiments can be fairly compared to insects (locomotion, navigation, object manipulation, etc.) [3][4][5]. On the other hand, and from a purely robotic perspective, hexapod robots represent an optimum compromise between overall stability and energy cost.…”

“…In principle, a pair of legs following the third and fourth rules tend not to lift together. A partial implementation of the rules as modular neural control with a CPG was performed and tested on a simulated dung beetle-like robot [4]. The controller can generate four different robot behaviors including forward walking, backward walking, level-ground ball rolling, and sloped-ground ball rolling.…”

Framework for Developing Bio-Inspired Morphologies for Walking Robots

“…The ALPHA's complex controller is not introduced in order to highlight the bio-inspired morphology's base performance. Complex controllers have instead been presented by [17,18]. Simulations were used instead of the constructed prototype (Figure 2b) to avoid invariances from physical tests and controller specific behaviours.…”