【国际版】鳗鱼机器人，水下机器人新方向！
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中文版正文965字，
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Lots of robots use bioinspiration in their design. Humanoids, quadrupeds, snake robots—if an animal has figured out a clever way of doing something, odds are there's a robot that's tried to duplicate it. But animals are often just a little too clever for the robots that we build that try to mimic them, which is why researchers at Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne in Switzerland (EPFL) are using robots to learn about how animals themselves do what they do. In a paper published today in Science Robotics, roboticists from EPFL's Biorobotics Laboratory introduce a robotic eel that leverages sensory feedback from the water it swims through to coordinate its motion without the need for central control, suggesting a path towards simpler, more robust mobile robots.
许多机器人在设计中依靠大自然带来的灵感。人形机器人、四足动物、蛇机器人如果一种动物想出了一种聪明的做事方法，那么很可能有一个机器人试图复制它。但是对于我们制造的试图模仿动物的机器人来说，动物往往有点太聪明了，这就是为什么瑞士洛桑瑞士联邦理工学院（EPFL）的研究人员正在使用机器人来了解动物自己是如何做的。EPFL生物机器人实验室的机器人学家在今天发表在《科学机器人学》上的一篇论文中介绍了一种机器鳗鱼，它利用游过的水的感官反馈来协调运动，而无需中央控制，这为更简单、更健壮的移动机器人提供了一条道路。
The robotic eel—called AgnathaX—is a descendant of AmphiBot, which has been swimming around at EPFL for something like two decades. AmphiBot's elegant motion in the water has come from the equivalent what are called central pattern generators (CPGs), which are sequences of neural circuits (the biological kind) that generate the sort of rhythms that you see in eel-like animals that rely on oscillations to move. It's possible to replicate these biological circuits using newfangled electronic circuits and software, leading to the same kind of smooth (albeit robotic) motion in AmphiBot.
这种被称为AgnathaX的机器鳗鱼是AmphiBot的后代，AmphiBot在EPFL已经游了大约20年。AmphiBot在水中优雅的运动来自于被称为中央模式发生器（CPG）的等效物，这是一系列神经回路（生物类型），产生你在鳗鱼类动物身上看到的那种依靠振荡来运动的节奏。使用新型电子电路和软件复制这些生物电路是可能的，从而在AmphiBot中产生同样的平滑（尽管是机器人）运动。
Biological researchers had pretty much decided that CPGs explained the extent of wiggly animal motion, until it was discovered you can chop an eel's spinal cord in half, and it'll somehow maintain its coordinated undulatory swimming performance. Which is kinda nuts, right? Obviously, something else must be going on, but trying to futz with eels to figure out exactly what it was isn't, I would guess, pleasant for either researchers or their test subjects, which is where the robots come in. We can't make robotic eels that are exactly like the real thing, but we can duplicate some of their sensing and control systems well enough to understand how they do what they do.
生物学研究人员基本上认为CPG解释了动物摆动的程度，直到发现你可以将鳗鱼的脊髓切成两半，它会以某种方式保持协调的波动游泳性能。这有点疯狂，对吧？显然，肯定还有别的事情在发生，但我想，试图用鳗鱼来搞清楚到底是什么，对研究人员或他们的受试者来说都不是一件愉快的事，而这正是机器人的用武之地。我们无法制造出与真人一模一样的机器鳗鱼，但我们可以很好地复制它们的一些传感和控制系统，以了解它们是如何做的。
AgnathaX exhibits the same smooth motions as the original version of AmphiBot, but it does so without having to rely on centralized programming that would be the equivalent of a biological CPG. Instead, it uses skin sensors that can detect pressure changes in the water around it, a feature also found on actual eels. By hooking these pressure sensors up to AgnathaX's motorized segments, the robot can generate swimming motions even if its segments aren't connected with each other—without a centralized nervous system, in other words. This spontaneous syncing up of disconnected moving elements is called entrainment, and the best demo of it that I've seen is this one, using metronomes:
AgnathaX展示了与AmphiBot原始版本相同的平滑运动，但它不必依赖于集中式编程，而集中式编程相当于生物CPG。取而代之的是，它使用皮肤传感器，可以检测周围水域的压力变化，这一特征也可以在实际的鳗鱼身上发现。换言之，通过将这些压力传感器连接到AgnathaX的机动部分，机器人可以产生游泳运动，即使它的部分在没有集中神经系统的情况下彼此没有连接。这种不连续运动元素的自发同步被称为夹带，我见过的最好的演示就是这个，使用节拍器：
The reason why this isn't just neat but also useful is that it provides a secondary method of control for robots. If the centralized control system of your swimming robot gets busted, you can rely on this water pressure-mediated local control to generate a swimming motion. And there are applications for modular robots as well, since you can potentially create a swimming robot out of a bunch of different physically connected modules that don't even have to talk to each other.
这不仅简洁而且有用的原因是它为机器人提供了一种辅助控制方法。如果你的游泳机器人的集中控制系统失灵，你可以依靠水压调节的局部控制来产生游泳运动。模块化机器人也有应用，因为你可以用一堆不同的物理连接的模块来创造一个游泳机器人，这些模块甚至不需要相互交谈。
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