A model of antagonistic triarticular muscle mechanism for lancelet robot

This paper describes the development of a robot simulating a lancelet, a chordate often treated as a surrogate for the ancestor of the vertebrate. Although a lancelet has primitive neural circuits, it accomplishes dexterous swimming motion. Hence this study attempts to imitate the swimming motion with simple control architecture and investigate the principle of motion control. The control principle is discussed in comparison with that of human and motors. The similarity between the three motion control systems leads to basic motion control principle with less computation. Simulation results show the minimum composition of the robot for efficient swimming motion. Experimental results show the property of the swimming motion generated by the proposed method.