Morphological Computation

Letting a body's own shape and material handle part of the work a controller would otherwise have to compute.

Morphological computation is an idea from embodied cognition and bio-inspired robotics: a body's shape, material elasticity, and mass distribution can themselves take on some of the work that would otherwise have to be handled by a controller, effectively offloading computation onto the body. The idea has been promoted mainly by embodied-cognition researchers such as Rolf Pfeifer. The classic example is Tad McGeer's passive dynamic walker from the late 1980s: with no motors and no controller, it walks down a gentle slope using only gravity and the natural swing of its legs. Soft grippers, which conform to an object's shape through material deformation alone, are another common example. Hoffmann and Müller caution that a softer, more complex body is not automatically easier to control, and that morphology and control method need to be balanced against each other.

ExampleA passive dynamic walker has no motors at all — leg length, mass distribution, and gravity alone let it walk down a shallow slope. According to Wikipedia, a Cornell biped built on this principle has a cost of transport of around 0.20, close to a human's, versus about 3.23 for Honda's ASIMO.

Also called

Morphological Computing

Related

Embodied Cognition · Passive Dynamic Walking · Soft Robot · Compliance · Morphology-Control Co-design · Cost of Transport

Sources

Trade-Offs in Exploiting Body Morphology for Control (Hoffmann & Müller)
Passive dynamics - Wikipedia