Meeting Abstract
Geometric Methods for Locomotion in Limbless and Legged Locomotion Organisms generate patterns of periodic self-deformations, which we will refer to broadly as “gaits,” to locomote through their environments. Inspired by this, the robotics community has created a variety of limbless (e.g., snake) and limbed systems that also use gaits to locomote. Our group has been building upon a branch of mathematics called geometric mechanics that we use to design gaits in mechanical systems, as well as model gaits in biological ones. In this talk, we will show that geometric mechanics facilitates systematic discovery of locomotor templates in diverse living systems, and provides candidate high level control targets for robot control in natural environments. Essentially, our approach establishes a functional relationship, called a connection, that maps changes in the system’s internal shape, ie self-deformations, to displacements in position. More specifically, the connection can be used to “map” a closed loop, ie., a gait, in the shape space to displacement. With this technique, we were able to optimize criteria to determine gaits that modeled biological motion. Recently, we have extended the approaches, originally designed for limbless snake-like systems, to multi-legged ones, both biological and robotic. In particular, we are interested in legged systems that also bend their backs, e.g., salamanders, as they have both a “legged” portion and a “undulatory” portion of locomotion.
