A soft body as a reservoir: case studies in a dynamic model of octopus-inspired soft robotic arm
Open accessAbstract
The behaviors of the animals or embodied agents are characterized by the dynamic coupling between the brain, the body, and the environment. This implies that control, which is conventionally thought to be handled by the brain or a controller, can partially be outsourced to the physical body and the interaction with the environment. This idea has been demonstrated in a number of recently constructed robots, in particular from the field of "soft robotics". Soft robots are made of a soft material introducing high-dimensionality, non-linearity, and elasticity, which often makes the robots difficult to control. Biological systems such as the octopus are mastering their complex bodies in highly sophisticated manners by capitalizing on their body dynamics. We will demonstrate that the structure of the octopus arm cannot only be exploited for generating behavior but also, in a sense, as a computational resource. By using a soft robotic arm inspired by the octopus we show in a number of experiments how control is partially incorporated into the physical arm's dynamics and how the arm's dynamics can be exploited to approximate non-linear dynamical systems and embed non-linear limit cycles. Future application scenarios as well as the implications of the results for the octopus biology are also discussed.
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Some evidence points to the potential of mechanical properties of the arm to serve a direct computational role.
“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., 2013
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- Authors
- Nakajima, K., Hauser, H., Kang, R., Guglielmino, E., Caldwell, D. G., & Pfeifer, R.
- Affiliations
- University of Zurich (CH)
- Italian Institute of Technology (IT)
- Corresponding author
- Nakajima, Kohei
- Venue
- Frontiers in Computational Neuroscience
- Publisher
- Frontiers Media SA
- Published
- 2013
- Volume
- 7
- Pages
- 91-91
- ISSN
- 1662-5188 (ISSN-L)
- PMC
- PMC3705147
- OpenAlex
- W1986237366
- Cited by
- 180
- References
- 69
- Citations by year
- 2026: 18 · 2025: 19 · 2024: 19 · 2023: 21 · 2022: 18 · 2021: 17 · 2020: 8 · 2019: 18 · 2018: 16 · 2017: 7 · 2016: 6 · 2015: 7 · 2014: 5 · 2013: 1
- FWCI
- 3.49
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- gold
- doi.org
- Licence
- cc-by
- Locations
- Frontiers in Computational Neuroscience (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- Europe PMC (PubMed Central) (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed Central (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) (submittedVersion, cc-by-sa)
- Bristol Research (University of Bristol) (submittedVersion)
- Repository for Publications and Research Data (ETH Zurich) (submittedVersion, cc-by)
- ETH Zürich Research Collection (cc-by)
- Funders
- European Commission (231608)
- Japan Society for the Promotion of Science
- Topics
- Physical Sciences › Engineering › Biomedical Engineering › Soft Robotics and Applications
- Physical Sciences › Engineering › Biomedical Engineering › Robotic Locomotion and Control
- Physical Sciences › Engineering › Mechanical Engineering › Advanced Materials and Mechanics
- Keywords
- soft robotics, octopus arm, octopus-inspired robot, body dynamics, dynamic control, nonlinear dynamical systems, limit cycles, embodied control, soft materials
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