Research into resilient under-actuated robots

自2006年以来，工程系统的弹性得到了广泛的关注。弹性是系统通过自身资源和力量从任何事故中恢复的能力。提出研究的动机来自我们对弹性系统的重要性的理解，特别是弹性机器人系统。本研究计划的长期目标是在系统，特别是机器人系统中建立弹性工程。为了确保研究结果将最广泛地适用，提出的研究将基于欠驱动机器人，这是最普遍和最复杂的机器人类型。提出的研究有四个短期目标（简而言之）：(1)设计有弹性的欠驱动机器人，以实现尽可能多的恢复原理；(2)寻找机器人的最佳配置，以恢复机器人因部分损坏（例如失去一条腿）而失去的功能；(3)设计一种连接器，使主动、被动、固定关节和断关节能够连接起来，以方便部分损坏的机器人进行自我改变；(4)规划和调度自变过程，实现机器人的最佳配置。

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.