Morphological computation of perception and action

生物对于感知和行动有着相同的化身。例如，提供关节角度和速度感觉的主轴传感器嵌入在驱动该关节的肌肉上。提供力感的肌腱传感器也直接参与关节的动作。当肌肉被激活以采取行动时，这些传感器的功能会发生变化吗？拮抗肌肉的共同激活不仅在驱动中发挥作用，而且在感知中也发挥作用吗？这个项目将通过对人类参与者和提供更多内部变量的可控僵硬软机器人进行有针对性的实验来研究这些问题。最近，我们使用软机器人探头对软组织中的硬结节进行了定位实验，结果表明，调节探头的刚度可以最大化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中的硬结节的同一任务中，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量化标准来控制软机器人探头的内部阻抗，以最大限度地提高操纵软对象的效率，以感知其隐藏的属性，如在对患者的腹部进行体检时。因此，在这个项目中，我们将使用由人类参与者和具有可控硬度的软机器人探头完成的精心设计的探测任务来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，以测试关于内阻抗在感知和行动中的作用的几个假说。最后，我们将使用一个人-机器人协作的体检任务来测试一种新型的具有可控刚度的软机器人探头的有效性，以及它的刚度和行为控制算法。我们将设计和制造这种新型的软机器人探头，以便控制其软组织的硬度，在其中嵌入传感器，以获得体验式触觉。我们还将设计和制作一种新型的具有可控硬度的内脏器官的软腹体模来进行触诊实验。上述两个设计-新颖的探头和腹部体模-的创新过程将与各自领域的三个领先行业合作伙伴合作完成。这些新的见解将使我们设计软机器人的方式发生范式转变，这些软机器人可以在远程医疗干预、购物、灾难应对、游戏、博物馆、安检和制造等应用中分享可控刚性体现，用于感知和行动。

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.