Research into resilient under-actuated robots

自2006年以来，工程系统的复原力受到了广泛关注。复原力是一个系统通过自身资源和力量从任何灾难中恢复的能力。提出研究的动机来自于我们对弹性系统，特别是弹性机器人系统的重要性的理解。该研究计划的长期目标是在系统中建立弹性工程，特别是机器人系统。为确保研究成果具有最广泛的适用性，本文将以欠驱动机器人为研究对象，欠驱动机器人是机器人中最通用、最复杂的类型。本研究提出了四个短期目标（简而言之）：（1）设计弹性欠驱动机器人以实现尽可能多的恢复原理;（2）找到机器人的最佳配置以恢复由于机器人的部分损坏而失去的功能（3）设计一种连接器，用于实现主动、被动和固定关节和分离，以促进部分损坏的机器人的自我改变;（4）规划和调度机器人的自变换过程，实现机器人的最佳构形。* 拟议的研究预计将为具有弹性行为的欠驱动机器人系统的设计和操作提供理论和方法。该计划还将产生几个弹性机器人系统的原型。这项拟议中的研究有几个智力上的优点。弹性欠驱动机器人的概念还没有在文献中研究，尽管它的好处，在通用性，能力和成本效益。事实上，人类在许多被动关节和结构上是欠驱动的。弹性机器人系统是欠驱动机器人的一种特殊情况，它只包含具有一定结构的主动模块，因此欠驱动机器人的知识生成方法也适用于自重构自主模块机器人。* 机器人的弹性行为为社会增加了价值。例如，在战场上，有弹性的机器人可以有更高的机会战胜敌人，因为在战场上作战能力交付的寿命肯定是一个关键因素。对于诸如核电站事故和地震之类的灾难，救援机器人的弹性行为是非常期望的，因为在这些情况下，机器人需要交互的环境是动态的，并且机器人受到损坏的可能性更高。*** *** ********

Resilience of engineering systems has gained much attention since 2006. Resilience characterizes a system in terms of its ability to recover from any mishap through its own resources and power. The motivation of the proposed research comes from our understanding of the importance of resilient systems, especially resilient robotic systems. The long-term goal of this research program is to establish resilience engineering in systems, especially robotic systems. To ensure the research results will be most widely applicable, the proposed research will be based on under-actuated robots, which are the most general and the most complex type of robots. There are four short-term goals of the proposed research (in brief): (1) designing resilient under-actuated robots for enabling as many recovery principles as possible; (2) finding the best configuration of a robot to recover lost function due to partial damage of the robot (e.g. one leg lost); (3) designing a connector for enabling active, passive, and fixed joints and disjoints to facilitate self-changes of the partially damaged robot; (4) planning and scheduling the self-change process to achieve the best configuration of the robot. ***The proposed research is anticipated to produce theories and methodologies for the design and operation of under-actuated robotics systems with resilient behavior. The program will also produce several prototypes of resilient robotic systems. The proposed research has a couple of intellectual merits. The notion of the resilient under-actuated robot has not been studied in the literature despite its benefits in terms of generality, capability, and cost-effectiveness. In fact, humans are under-actuated with many passive joints and structures. Resilient robotic systems which only have active modules with some structures are a special case of the under-actuated robot, so the knowledge generated for under-actuated robots is applicable to self-reconfigurable autonomous modular robots in literature. *** The resilient behavior of robots adds value to society. For instance, resilient robots in a battlefield situation can have a higher chance to win against the enemy, as the longevity of combat capability delivery in battlefields is certainly a critical factor. The resilient behavior of rescuer robots for disasters such as nuclear power plant accidents and earthquakes is highly desired, because in those situations, the environment in which the robots need to interact is dynamic, and there is higher chance for the robots to get damaged. *** *** ********