A Cytoskeletal-Based Robotic Controller

摘要

The eukaryotic cell is a biological device that interacts with its environment by integrating a wide variety of signals to produce an adaptive set of behaviors to enhance its fitness. Viewing these interactions as information processing tasks, the eukaryotic cell can be viewed as an autonomous device that produces a wide range of complex behaviors without need for neural processing. The paper describes a virtual biomorphic robot controller that implements a cytoskeletal based signaling mechanism that attempts to capture the same organizational characteristics as found in the natural system. These characteristics include: an adaptive structure that organizes by self-assembly and utilizes a diffusional mechanism to influence structure organization. The proposed controller is placed in a virtual robotic device that is required to find the center of a two-dimensional space using an illumination source as a positional cue. The goal of this work is to use these organizational characteristics to reproduce a potential long-range signaling mechanism in a robotic device as is found in the eukaryotic cell.