title: Exploiting short-term memory in soft body dynamics as a computational resource.
abstract: Soft materials are not only highly deformable, but they also possess rich and diverse body dynamics. Soft body dynamics exhibit a variety of properties, including nonlinearity, elasticity and potentially infinitely many degrees of freedom. Here, we demonstrate that such soft body dynamics can be employed to conduct certain types of computation. Using body dynamics generated from a soft silicone arm, we show that they can be exploited to emulate functions that require memory and to embed robust closed-loop control into the arm. Our results suggest that soft body dynamics have a short-term memory and can serve as a computational resource. This finding paves the way towards exploiting passive body dynamics for control of a large class of underactuated systems.
authors.affiliation: The Hakubi Center for Advanced Research, Kyoto University, 606-8501 Kyoto, Japan Department of Applied Analysis and Complex Dynamical Systems, Graduate School of Informatics, Kyoto University, 606-8501 Kyoto, Japan jc_mc_datsu@yahoo.co.jp.
authors.forename: K
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Nakajima
authors.affiliation: Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Department of Informatics, University of Zurich, 8050 Zurich, Switzerland.
authors.forename: T
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Li
authors.affiliation: Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Department of Informatics, University of Zurich, 8050 Zurich, Switzerland.
authors.forename: H
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Hauser
authors.affiliation: Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Department of Informatics, University of Zurich, 8050 Zurich, Switzerland.
authors.forename: R
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Pfeifer
mesh_terms: D008422:Materials Testing; D012828:Silicones
chemical_list: D012828:Silicones
keywords: morphological computation; octopus; physical reservoir computing; soft robots