A soft-bodied fluid-driven amoeboid robot inspired by plasmodium of true slime mold

Animals exhibit astoundingly adaptive and supple locomotion under real world constraints. In order to endow robots with similar capabilities, we must implement many degrees of freedom, equivalent to animals, into the robots' bodies. For taming many degrees of freedom, the concept of autonomous decentralized control plays a pivotal role. However, a systematic way of designing such autonomous decentralized control system is still missing. Aiming at understanding the principles that underlie animals' locomotion, in our early studies, we focused on plasmodium of true slime mold, a primitive living organism, and extracted a design scheme for autonomous decentralized control system. In order to demonstrate the relevance of this design scheme, this paper presents a soft-bodied fluid-driven amoeboid robot inspired by plasmodium of true slime mold. The significant features of this robot are twofold: (1) the robot has fluidic circuit (i.e., cylinders and nylon tubes filled with fluid) and truly soft and deformable body stemming from real-time tunable springs, the former serves as protoplasm and the latter is used for elastic actuators; and (2) a fully decentralized control using coupled oscillators with completely local sensory feedback mechanism is realized by exploiting the long-distance physical interaction between the body parts stemming from the law of conservation of protoplasmic mass. The experimental results show that this robot exhibits truly supple locomotion without relying on any hierarchical structure. The results obtained are expected to shed new light on design scheme for autonomous decentralized control system.