editorial biologically inspired roboticsdownloads.hindawi.com/journals/jr/2015/894394.pdfeditorial...

EditorialBiologically Inspired Robotics

Liwei Shi,1 Maki K. Habib,2 Nan Xiao,1,3 and Huosheng Hu4

1The Institute of Advanced Biomedical Engineering System, School of Life Science, Beijing Institute of Technology,No. 5, Zhongguancun South Street, Haidian District, Beijing 100081, China2Mechanical Engineering Department, School of Sciences and Engineering, The American University in Cairo, Cairo 11511, Egypt3Faculty of Engineering, Kagawa University, 2217-20 Hayashi-cho, Takamatsu 761-0396, Japan4School of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering, University of Essex, Wivenhoe Park, Colchester CO4 3SQ, UK

Correspondence should be addressed to Liwei Shi; [email protected]

Received 13 September 2015; Accepted 14 September 2015

Copyright © 2015 Liwei Shi et al.This is an open access article distributed under the Creative CommonsAttribution License, whichpermits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Biologically inspired robotics has enabled today’s robotsto operate in a variety of unstructured and dynamicallychanging environments in addition to traditional structuredenvironments. As a result, intelligent robots will soon beready to serve in our home, hospital, office, and outdoors. Itis clear that bioinspired methods are becoming increasinglyimportant in the face of the complexity of today’s demandingapplications. Biological inspiration in robotics is leadingto complex structures with sensory-motor coordination, inwhich learning often plays an important role in achievingadaptation. This special issue is focused on the theoreticaland technological challenges of evolutionary transformationfrom biological systems to intelligent robots.

The paper “Development and Evaluation of CompactRobot Imitating a Hermit Crab for Inspecting the OuterSurface of Pipes” by N. Imajo et al. concentrates on an outer-pipe inspection robot. The robot’s locomotion mechanismis developed to imitate a terrestrial hermit crab’s claws. Itis equipped with two rimless wheels. Each of the spokes istipped with a neodymiummagnet, which allows the robot toremain attached to even a vertical steel pipe. Moreover, therobot has a mechanism for adjusting the camber angle of theright and left wheels, allowing it to tightly grip pipes withdifferent diameters.

The paper “Bioinspired Tracking Control of High SpeedNonholonomic Ground Vehicles” by A. Shoemaker andA. Leonessa presents a control algorithm based on a unicyclemodel. This algorithm focuses on driving the current vehicleto within some variable following distance of a user definedreference system by commanding longitudinal and angular

rates. This algorithm is proven stable through Lyapunovcriteria. The results show that the algorithm demonstratessignificant promise in high speed trajectory tracking withobstacle avoidance.

The paper “Unified Switching between Flying and Perch-ing of a Bioinspired Robot Using Impedance Control” by S.Du et al. introduces a unified impedance control approachfor bioinspired flying and perching robots. The impedanceforce control method is developed to enable the robot toapproach a desired position and handle the contact forcewith the environment smoothly until the adsorption deviceperches on the object surface steadily.

The paper “Rolling Locomotion Control of a BiologicallyInspired Quadruped Robot Based on Energy Compensation”by T. Nemoto et al. proposes an approach to control rollinglocomotion with the quadruped robot. A dynamic model ofthe quadruped robot with rolling locomotion is developed byapplying a constraint force due to collision and contact withthe ground to a base quadruped robot model. The proposedcontrol approach is effective in achieving periodic rollinglocomotion.

Thepaper “Development andMotionTesting of a RoboticRay” by J. He and Y. Zhang develops a robotic ray based onthe simplified pectoral structure of living bluespotted ray.Themechanical structure and control circuit are presented, andkinematic analysis on the fin ray and the full fin is discussed.The average propulsion velocity generally increases withthe increase of kinematic parameters such as frequency,amplitude, and wavelength, respectively.

Hindawi Publishing CorporationJournal of RoboticsVolume 2015, Article ID 894394, 2 pageshttp://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2015/894394

2 Journal of Robotics

The paper “Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Navigation UsingWide-Field Optical Flow and Inertial Sensors” by M. B.Rhudy et al. investigates vision-aided inertial navigation tech-niques which do not rely upon GPS using UAV (unmannedaerial vehicle) flight data. Two different formulations are pre-sented, a full state estimation formulation which captures theaircraft ground velocity vector and attitude and a simplifiedformulation which assumes that all of the aircraft velocity isin the forward direction. In addition, a state is included ineach formulation in order to estimate the distance betweenthe image center and the aircraft.

The paper “Sparse Approximation for Nonrigid Structurefrom Motion” by Y. Wang et al. proposes a novel sparseapproximationmethod to resolve the nonrigid structure frommotion problem in trajectory space. Instead of generating atruncated traditional trajectory basis, this method uses anatom dictionary which includes a set of overcomplete basesto estimate the real shape of the deformable object.

The paper “Simulation of Octopus Arm Based on Cou-pled CPGs” by J. Tian and Q. Lu presents three coupled cen-tral pattern generators (CPGs) and a 2-dimensional dynamicmodel of the octopus arm to explore possible strategies ofthe octopus movement control. The CPGs’ signals treatedas activation are added on the ventral, dorsal, and transver-sal sides, respectively. The effects of the octopus arm arediscussed when the parameters of the CPGs are changed.The results are beneficial for researchers to understand theoctopus movement further.

The paper “Action Selection and Operant Conditioning:A Neurorobotic Implementation” by A. Cyr and F. Theriaultshows an AS (action selection) process made from simplecellular elements. It is based on a CPG and sensory neuronswhich influence decision neurons in their choice to generatea behavior from the action neurons. The experiments areconducted under a biologically inspired paradigm, specifi-cally with a SNN (spiking neural network) acting as braincontroller for virtual and physical robots. The simplicity andthe generic aspect of above ASmodel may provide a fast tracksolution to build more complex SNN, including multipleactions in different dynamic scenarios.

The paper “Inverse Kinematic Analysis and Evaluationof a Robot for Nondestructive Testing Application” by Z. Luet al. provides a simple and effective method for the inversekinematics problem of an industrial robot system. The arm-wrist separateness method is adopted to solve the inversekinematics for robots with 6 DOF.The proposed method willgreatly benefit the development of nondestructive industrialtesting.

Liwei ShiMaki K. Habib

Nan XiaoHuosheng Hu

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