Animals can accomplish many incredible behavioral feats across a wide range of operational environments and scales that current robots struggle to match. One explanation for this performance gap is the extraordinary properties of the biological materials that comprise animals, such as muscle tissue. Using living muscle tissue as an actuator can endow robotic systems with highly desirable properties such as self-healing, compliance, and biocompatibility. Unlike traditional soft robotic actuators, living muscle biohybrid actuators exhibit unique adaptability, growing stronger with use. While muscle adaptability is a benefit to muscular organisms, it currently presents a challenge for biohybrid researchers: how does one design and control a robot whose actuators’ force output changes over time? Here, we incorporate muscle adaptability into a many-muscle biohybrid robot design and modeling tool, leveraging reinforcement learning as both a co-design partner and system controller. Our results show that adaptive agents outperform non-adaptive agents in terms of maximum rewards and training time. Together, these contributions can enable the elucidation of muscle actuator adaptation and inform the design and modeling of adaptive many-muscle robots.

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Hitting the ‘Gym’: Reinforcement Learning for Control and Co-design of Exercise-Strengthened Biohybrid Robots in Simulation

  • Saul Schaffer,
  • Hima Hrithik Pamu,
  • Victoria A. Webster-Wood

摘要

Animals can accomplish many incredible behavioral feats across a wide range of operational environments and scales that current robots struggle to match. One explanation for this performance gap is the extraordinary properties of the biological materials that comprise animals, such as muscle tissue. Using living muscle tissue as an actuator can endow robotic systems with highly desirable properties such as self-healing, compliance, and biocompatibility. Unlike traditional soft robotic actuators, living muscle biohybrid actuators exhibit unique adaptability, growing stronger with use. While muscle adaptability is a benefit to muscular organisms, it currently presents a challenge for biohybrid researchers: how does one design and control a robot whose actuators’ force output changes over time? Here, we incorporate muscle adaptability into a many-muscle biohybrid robot design and modeling tool, leveraging reinforcement learning as both a co-design partner and system controller. Our results show that adaptive agents outperform non-adaptive agents in terms of maximum rewards and training time. Together, these contributions can enable the elucidation of muscle actuator adaptation and inform the design and modeling of adaptive many-muscle robots.