NC West Virginia News

West Virginia University roboticists are developing an innovative path to robot autonomy with Loopy, a “multicellular robot” composed of interconnected robot cells arranged in a ring. Supported by a National Science Foundation award, the WVU team aims to test Loopy’s ability to “co-design” itself, determining its shape with minimal human intervention. The researchers believe Loopy can learn to use its body to mark the boundary of contaminated areas, such as oil or toxin spills.

Inspired by natural phenomena like ant swarms clustering around spilled soda or tree roots growing around obstacles, Loopy changes form as each of its cells responds organically to the environment.

Lead researcher Yu Gu, Mechanical, Materials and Aerospace Engineering Academy of Distinguished Alumni Professor at the WVU Benjamin M. Statler College of Engineering and Mineral Resources, highlighted Loopy's potential impact on robotics. He noted that its ability to reshape itself could be "transformative," offering flexibility unmatched by conventional robots in unpredictable real-world situations.

“Loopy originated as a thought experiment in my lab,” Gu said. “It was conceived as a challenge to the prevalent ‘top down’ thinking in robotics, in which the robot is passive and the human designs, programs and builds it."

“In contrast, Loopy is an example of ‘swarm robotics.’ Many small robot cells interlink to make Loopy, allowing lifelike traits and complex, coordinated behaviors like problem-solving to emerge from the cells’ simple, decentralized reactions to stimuli.”

Loopy consists of 36 identical cells connected in a circle. Each cell can control its own movement and has sensors that monitor joint angles and external stimuli such as light and temperature.

To evaluate Loopy’s responses to various situations, Gu’s lab is equipped with a tabletop test environment featuring overhead cameras, a motion capture system, and a projector. Heating wires under the table create warm spots simulating contamination areas. An overhead thermal camera visualizes the heatmap while each cell has an embedded temperature sensor.

Together with doctoral student and NSF graduate fellow Trevor Smith from Appalachia, Pennsylvania, Gu will test Loopy under different conditions including varying surface materials and obstacles. They will assess Loopy’s accuracy in circling contamination areas and its responses to unforeseen circumstances.

They will also compare Loopy's organic solutions with those generated through more conventional centralized approaches where human designers control individual cells using sensor data.

“The research progress on Loopy will likely be nonlinear and unpredictable,” Gu said. “More often than not, the outcome of our experiments with Loopy is unexpected; that has been a source of insight and a driver for future investigations."

“What we want to know is whether Loopy’s self-organized solutions offer greater adaptability and resilience than programmed behaviors," he added. "Once we establish conditions fostering spontaneous emergence of these complex behaviors in multicellular robots, I believe robots like Loopy could have diverse applications ranging from adaptive leak sealing to interactive art displays.”

Gu pointed out that traditional top-down robot systems are “unnatural and brittle,” struggling to adapt to new conditions. In swarm robotics however, collective intelligence allows new behaviors to emerge naturally through a “bottom up” process.

“Our approach is philosophically similar to permaculture," Gu said. "In our robot design process there are three equal players: humans, the robot and the environment.”

Gu drew particular inspiration from studies on plant intelligence for biological models for Loopy. For instance chemical signaling in plants served as his model for how decentralized information among cells contributes to collective behavior.

“Plant roots grow by producing new cells,” he explained. “Each cell responds to extrinsic factors like water or nutrients presence and intrinsic factors like hormones coordinating root growth."

“This work blurs lines between a robot’s physical form behavior environment," Gu added."Loopy could fundamentally alter our understanding autonomy adaptability design robotics.”

-WVU-

mm/8/21/24