Chaotic Robots and neuroscience linked

Chaotic cockroaches may sound like the stuff of nightmares, but they could be key to making robots more adaptable. The application of chaos theory to the mobility of robotic insects may also help biologists to understand animal motion and could have medical applications. Autonomous robots designed to venture into hostile environments where humans cannot safely or easily tread must be able to adapt their motion to their surroundings — the rocky terrain of another planet, or a war zone, for instance. But at the moment adding new behavioural patterns, such as a new walking gait, to a robot's repertoire is cumbersome, says Marc Timme, a physicist at the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience in Göttingen, Germany. "Each new gait requires the addition of new hardware for a new controller to govern that behaviour," explains Timme. Any decision-making process then requires all controllers to co-ordinate their information, making the robot less efficient and versatile. By contrast, in nature even primitive creatures such as cockroaches can control complicated motion quickly and with ease, despite having relatively few neurons, says Timme. Inspired by the cockroach's abilities, Timme and his colleagues have built a six-legged robot, named AMOS (Advanced MObility Sensor driven), with 18 motors controlling leg movement and 18 sensors providing information about heat, light and contact with the ground. The team's aim was to fit AMOS with a single controlling processor that would allow it to adjust its walking pattern quickly and automatically in response to changes in its environment (see Nature's video).