Overview

The problem of locomotion control in legged robots can be faced by taking inspiration from biology and applying to walking robots the principles underlying the neural control of locomotion in animals. This is the viewpoint of the so-called biologically inspired robotics (whose interests, of course, are not restricted to locomotion control) and is a major theme of this book.

Bio-inspired robotics [Webb and Consi (2001); Arkin (1998)] is, by definition, a broad field, including synergies from various disciplines: neuroscience, biology, ethology and robotics. Robotics itself is multi-disciplinary involving at least mechanics, electronics and computer science. Hence a large variety of bio-inspired approaches have been developed, whose degree of biological inspiration ranges from very accurate mechanical designs (the most representative example of which is the cockroach-like robot illustrated in [Quinn et. al. (1998)]) to neuromorphic systems [Horiuchi (1992)].

From the engineering viewpoint the main reason for the great interest in bio-inspired approaches is the fact that bio-robotics provides suitable solutions for the design of efficient walking robots since the nature of the problems an animal and a legged robot deal with is the same. These solutions are very often common principles shared by a large variety of animals and are even present in low phyla, so they appear as simple solutions to hard problems. Applications of these principles are possible since great advances have been made by biologists in understanding animal locomotion, and at the same time they are interesting topics of study for biologists since bio-robots...