2026-03-06 ノースウェスタン大学
＜関連情報＞
- https://news.northwestern.edu/stories/2026/03/evolved-robots-are-born-to-run-and-refuse-to-die
- https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2519129123
再構成可能なモジュール型ロボットによる機敏な脚運動 Agile legged locomotion in reconfigurable modular robots
Chen Yu, David Matthews, Jingxian Wang, +3 , and Sam Kriegman
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Published:March 6, 2026
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2519129123
Significance
All legged robots deployed “in the wild” to date were given a body plan that was predefined by human designers and could not be redefined in situ. The manual and permanent nature of this process has resulted in very few species of agile terrestrial robots beyond familiar four-limbed forms. Here, we introduce highly athletic modular building blocks and show how they enable the automatic design and rapid assembly of novel agile robots that can “hit the ground running” in unstructured outdoor environments. This suggests that others may adopt this approach to synthesize and study adaptive behaviors in the field using morphologies that emerge from the demands of the environment rather than prior assumptions.
Abstract
Legged machines are becoming increasingly agile and adaptive, but they have so far lacked the morphological diversity of legged animals, which have been rearranged and reshaped to fill millions of niches. Unlike their biological counterparts, legged machines have largely converged over the past decade to canonical quadrupedal and bipedal architectures that cannot be easily reconfigured to meet new tasks or recover from injury. Here, we introduce autonomous modular legs: agile yet minimal, single-degree-of-freedom jointed links that can learn complex dynamic behaviors and may be freely attached to form multilegged machines at the meter scale. This enables rapid repair, redesign, and recombination of highly dynamic modular agents that move quickly and acrobatically (nonquasistatically) through unstructured environments. Because each module is itself a complete agent, the bodies that contain them can sustain deep structural damage that would completely disable other legged robots. We also show how to encode the vast space of possible body configurations into a compact latent design space that can be efficiently explored, revealing a wide diversity of novel legged forms.
