Computing with a muscular-hydrostat system

Abstract

Octopus arms, as well as elephant trunks, squid tentacles, and vertebrate tongues are termed muscular-hydrostats. In such structures, the volume of the organ remains constant during their motions, enabling diverse, complex, and highly controlled movements without the support of a skeleton. Such flexible structures show major advantages over articulated arms that have a rigid skeleton and joints. These advantages have been attracting roboticists aiming to apply these material properties to soft robot controls. In this paper, we show that the muscular-hydrostat system itself has the computational capacity to achieve a complex nonlinear computation. By using a 3D dynamic simulator of the system inspired by the octopus, we actually demonstrate that the system is capable of emulating complex nonlinear dynamical systems by exploiting its elastic body dynamics as a computational resource. In addition, we systematically analyze its computational power in terms of memory capacity, and show that the system has an intrinsic and characteristic short term memory profile. Finally, the implications for soft robot control and future application scenarios are discussed.