Emergent Generation of Gait Pattern for a Myriapod Robot system Based on Energy Consumption

Locomotion of animals is said to be generated by CPG that is located at lower level of the nervous systerrl. We deal with an application of autonomous decentralized system like CPG to a myriapod locomotion robot. In this paper, we confirm by computer simulation that six subsystems generate gait pattern by the method of vector quantizat ion (VQ) under the conditions that each subsystem only have functions for controlling one leg and using local informations. The gate pattern is coded to the phase differences of each oscillator. Each subsystem learns a relation between the energy consumption and the phase difference using VQ. We succeeded in generating the gait pattern such that the energy consumptions for each leg are averaged.