Morphological computation of perception and action

众生在感知和行动上都有相同的体现。例如，提供关节角度和速度感觉的主轴传感器嵌入驱动该关节的肌肉中。提供力感的肌腱传感器也直接参与关节的驱动。当肌肉被激活采取行动时，这些传感器的功能会发生变化吗？拮抗肌肉的共同激活是否不仅在驱动中起作用，而且在感知中也起作用？该项目将通过与人类参与者和可控刚度软机器人进行有针对性的实验来研究这些问题，这些实验提供了更大的内部变量访问。我们最近使用软机器人探针在软组织中定位硬结节的实验表明，调整探针的刚度可以最大限度地提高感知硬结节的信息增益。我们还注意到，人类参与者在使用食指定位软组织硬结节的相同任务中使用不同的力-速度调制策略。这就提出了一个问题，即我们是否可以找到定量标准来控制软机器人探针的内部阻抗，从而最大限度地提高操纵软物体的效率，以感知其隐藏的特性，就像在对病人腹部进行体检一样。因此，在这个项目中，我们将使用精心设计的探测任务，由人类参与者和具有可控刚度的软机器人探测器完成，以获取各种级别的可测量信息，如肌肉共同收缩，速度和力的变化，以测试关于内部阻抗在感知和行动中的作用的几个假设。最后，我们将使用人机协作体检任务来测试具有可控刚度的新型软机器人探针及其刚度和行为控制算法的有效性。我们将设计和制造新型的柔性机器人探针，以便我们可以控制其软组织的刚度，传感器将嵌入其中以获得具身触觉感知。我们还将设计和制造一种具有可控刚度的内部器官的新型软腹假体进行触诊实验。上述两种设计的创新过程——新型探针和腹部假体——将与各自领域的三家领先工业伙伴合作完成。新的见解将使我们设计软体机器人的方式发生范式转变，这些软体机器人可以在远程医疗干预、购物机器人代理、灾难响应、游戏、博物馆、安全检查和制造等许多应用中共享感知和行动的可控刚度体现。

Living beings share the same embodiment for sensing and action. For instance, the spindle sensors that provide the feeling of a joint angle and speed are embedded on the muscles that actuate this joint. The tendon sensors that provide the feeling of force too are directly involved in actuation of the joint. Do the function of these sensors change when the muscles are activated to take action? Does the co-activation of antagonistic muscles play a role not only in actuation, but also in perception? This project will investigate these questions through targeted experiments with human participants and controllable stiffness soft robots that provide greater access to internal variables. Recent experiments we have conducted on localising hard nodules in soft tissues using soft robotic probes have shown that tuning the stiffness of the probe can maximise information gain of perceiving the hard nodule. We have also noticed that human participants use distinct force-velocity modulation strategies in the same task of localising a hard nodule in a soft tissue using the index finger. This raises the question as to whether we can find quantitative criteria to control the internal impedance of a soft robotic probe to maximise the efficacy of manipulating a soft object to perceive its hidden properties like in physical examination of a patient's abdomen. In this project, we will thus use carefully designed probing tasks done by both human participants and a soft robotic probe with controllable stiffness to access various levels of measurable information such as muscle co-contraction, change of speed and force, to test several hypotheses about the role of internal impedance in perception and action. Finally, we will use a human-robot collaborative physical examination task to test the effectiveness of a new soft robotic probe with controllable stiffness together with its stiffness and behaviour control algorithms. We will design and fabricate the novel soft robotic probe so that we can control the stiffness of its soft tissue in which sensors will be embedded to obtain embodied haptic perception. We will also design and fabricate a novel soft abdomen phantom with controllable stiffness internal organs to conduct palpation experiments. The innovation process of the above two designs - the novel probe and the abdomen phantom - will be done in collaboration with three leading industrial partners in the respective areas. The new insights will make a paradigm shift in the way we design soft robots that can share the controllable stiffness embodiment for both perception and action in a number of applications like remote medical interventions, robotic proxies in shopping, disaster response, games, museums, security screening, and manufacturing.