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Exploiting short-term memory in soft body dynamics as a computational resource
Open accessAbstract
Soft materials are not only highly deformable, but they also possess rich and diverse body dynamics. Soft body dynamics exhibit a variety of properties, including nonlinearity, elasticity and potentially infinitely many degrees of freedom. Here, we demonstrate that such soft body dynamics can be employed to conduct certain types of computation. Using body dynamics generated from a soft silicone arm, we show that they can be exploited to emulate functions that require memory and to embed robust closed-loop control into the arm. Our results suggest that soft body dynamics have a short-term memory and can serve as a computational resource. This finding paves the way towards exploiting passive body dynamics for control of a large class of underactuated systems.
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“Not only can mechanical properties of the arm facilitate computation, some evidence points to the potential of these properties to serve a direct computational role (Nakajima et al., 2013; Nakajima et al., 2014; Nakajima et al., 2015).”
From Lessons for Robotics From the Control Architecture of the Octopus (2022) · cites this paper as Nakajima et al., 2014
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Metadata
- Authors
- Nakajima, K., Li, T., Hauser, H., & Pfeifer, R.
- Affiliations
- Kyoto University (JP)
- University of Zurich (CH)
- Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Department of Informatics, University of Zurich, 8050 Zurich, Switzerland
- Corresponding author
- Nakajima, K.
- ORCID
- Nakajima, K.
- Venue
- Journal of The Royal Society Interface
- Publisher
- The Royal Society
- Published
- 2014-11-06
- Volume
- 11
- Issue
- 100
- Pages
- 20140437
- ISSN
- 1742-5662 (ISSN-L)
- 1742-5689
- OpenAlex
- W2964093246
- Cited by
- 128
- References
- 30
- Citations by year
- 2026: 15 · 2025: 18 · 2024: 10 · 2023: 9 · 2022: 13 · 2021: 14 · 2020: 11 · 2019: 12 · 2018: 9 · 2017: 7 · 2016: 8 · 2015: 2
- FWCI
- 2.94
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
- www.zora.uzh.ch
- Locations
- Journal of The Royal Society Interface (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- Bristol Research (University of Bristol) (publishedVersion)
- Explore Bristol Research (submittedVersion)
- Zurich Open Repository and Archive (University of Zurich) (submittedVersion, other-oa)
- Topics
- Physical Sciences › Engineering › Biomedical Engineering › Soft Robotics and Applications
- Physical Sciences › Engineering › Mechanical Engineering › Advanced Materials and Mechanics
- Physical Sciences › Engineering › Control and Systems Engineering › Robotic Locomotion and Control
- Keywords
- soft body dynamics, soft robotics, short-term memory, feedback control, underactuated systems, soft materials, nonlinear elasticity
- MeSH terms
- Materials Testing, Silicones
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