A biologically inspired controller for hexapod walking: Simple solutions by exploiting physical properties

The locomotor system of slowly walking insects is well suited for coping wi th highly irregular terrain and therefore might represent a paragon for an artificial six-legged walking machine. Our investigations of the stick inse ct Carausius morosus indicate that these animals gain their adaptivity and flexibility mainly from the extremely decentralized organization of the con trol system that generates the leg movements. Neither the movement of a sin gle leg nor the coordination of all six legs (i.e., the gait) appears to be centrally pre-programmed. Thus, instead of using a single, central control ler with global knowledge, each leg appears to possess its own controller w ith only procedural knowledge for the generation of the leg's movement. Thi s is possible because exploiting the physical properties avoids the need fo r complete information on the geometry of the system that would be a prereq uisite for explicitly solving the problems. Hence, production of the gait i s an emergent property of the whole system, in which each of the six single -leg controllers obeys a few simple and local rules in processing state-dep endent information about its neighbors.