A CPG control system for a modular type mobile robot

In biological systems, the rhythm generating mechanism called the Central Pattern Generator (CPG) is supposed to play an important role in various rhythmic motions, such as locomotion, respiration, and heartbeat. Various models of CPG, for example, the Matsuoka Model and the Terman-Wang Model, have been proposed. In this paper, we introduced the Matsuoka Model as the neuron model of CPG in order to express the motion of a snake-like modular robot. The outputs of a CPG network are used as the target angles of corresponding joints of the snake-like modular robot. A microcontroller-based motion-controller was developed for each module where the system as a whole can be seen as a distributed control system. The robot can move forwards and backwards by changing weights and can change direction by adjusting command parameters from the upper layer.