Neural reservoir control of a bio-hybrid soft arm
Noel Naughton·Mattia Gazzola·Keshav Shivam·Apoorva Khairnar·Volodymyr Kindratenko·Seung Hyun Kim·Arman Tekinalp
A long-standing engineering problem, the control of soft robots is difficult because of their highly nonlinear, heterogeneous, anisotropic, and distributed nature. Here, bridging engineering and biology, neural reservoirs are employed for the dynamic control of a bio-hybrid model arm made of multiple muscle-tendon groups enveloping an elastic spine. We show how the use of reservoirs facilitates simultaneous control and self-modeling across challenging tasks, outperforming classic neural network