A Robotic Approach to Understanding Robustness

Abstract

Robustness is a property present in every living system which provides resilience against internal or external perturbations. Robustness is also highly desirable in engineered systems, as it makes them more resistant to unpredicted events. Despite its ubiquity, this concept is not yet understood and no existing framework provides a methodology to quantify it. Our work presents an approach to this problem through the use of robots acting as models for the study of robust organisms. Using robots, we look at how a change of robustness in sub-systems influences the robustness of the whole system. Our results show that using robotics offers an adequate level of complexity to study robustness while providing enough control to improve our understanding of this concept.