A method of gait coordination of hexapod robots using immune networks

Biological information processing systems can be regarded as one of the ultimate decentralized systems, and have been expected to provide various fruitful ideas in the engineering field. Among these systems, the immune system plays an important role in coping with dynamically changing environments by constructing self-nonself recognition networks among different species of antibodies, and has many interesting features from an engineering stand-point, such as learning, self-organizing abilities, and so on. However, it has not yet been applied to engineering fields. Therefore we pay close attention to the immune system and attempt to construct an artificial immune network for robot control. In this study we propose a new interpretation of the roles of antibodies in terms of self-assertion and subordination, and apply this idea to a gait coordination problem of a hexapod robot as a practical example. Several computer simulations are carried out, and the robustness against disturbances and the feasibility of our method are confirmed.