Agile Movements: Animal Behavior, Biomechanics, and Robot Devices

Friday, June 2, 2023

Location: ICC Capital Suite 17

Description

Robotic movements are becoming more agile. Although there is no unified definition of agility, agile movements have been interpreted in many ways – performing exotic motions, utilizing natural dynamics, moving across unstructured terrain, resolving survival issues, and more. Nonetheless, these agile behaviors still cannot reach those of animals, wherein biological systems outperform in many aspects – delicate body structure with passive mechanics/dynamics, complex neuromechanical motion planning and control systems, and advanced sensing capabilities like vision and haptics. Such discrepancy degenerates the robot's performance in real-world scenarios and prevents the robots from performing tasks that require quick response and overall stability. Thus, leveraging integrative biological studies of body physiology, neuroscience, and biomechanics, and robotic studies of mechanism design and manufacturing, planning and control, and lower- and higher-level kinematic and dynamic models appears to be the key to revealing the general mechanism and principle of agile movements. Specifically, this workshop wants to discuss:

1. What is the essence of agility in animals and robots? Do fast movements fully represent agile motion? If not, what other elements should be complementary?

2. After having a more comprehensive understanding of agility, how should we integrate it into applications like robot locomotion with current or other envisioning techniques?

The workshop focuses on agile movements, ranging from natural animal behaviors to robot motions as a result of both mechanism design and control. Agile movements have been reported in many animals and robots, but there still lacks a comprehensive discussion on the essence of agility, especially among researchers from various areas such as roboticists, biomechanics experts, biologists, and physicists. This workshop provides a platform for researchers, especially early career researchers, with different backgrounds to interact, and expects to attract participants who are non-regulars to robotics conferences. The goal of this workshop is to identify the challenges and opportunities of understanding and improving robotic agility from a diverse range of areas, including biology, biomechanics, mechanism design, and control. Such multidisciplinary cooperation will facilitate the robot deployment to the real world with complex unstructured environments and the creation of new directions for the fields, thus reinforcing the originality and diversity of ICRA 2023.

The topics of interest include but are not limited to the following: