A Biologically Inspired Design Principle for Building Robust Robotic Systems

TL;DR

This paper proposes a biologically inspired design principle involving active interconnections among robotic system components to improve robustness against environmental variations, demonstrated through long-horizon manipulation tasks in simulation and real-world experiments.

Contribution

It introduces a novel design principle inspired by biological systems that enhances robustness in robots without major modifications to individual components.

Findings

Active interconnections improve robustness to environmental changes.

The principle is effective in both simulated and real-world long-horizon tasks.

Systematic investigation of biological principles can advance robotic robustness.

Abstract

Robustness, the ability of a system to maintain performance under significant and unanticipated environmental changes, is a critical property for robotic systems. While biological systems naturally exhibit robustness, there is no comprehensive understanding of how to achieve similar robustness in robotic systems. In this work, we draw inspirations from biological systems and propose a design principle that advocates active interconnections among system components to enhance robustness to environmental variations. We evaluate this design principle in a challenging long-horizon manipulation task: solving lockboxes. Our extensive simulated and real-world experiments demonstrate that we could enhance robustness against environmental changes by establishing active interconnections among system components without substantial changes in individual components. Our findings suggest that a systematic investigation of design principles in system building is necessary. It also advocates for interdisciplinary collaborations to explore and evaluate additional principles of biological robustness to advance the development of intelligent and adaptable robotic systems.