Soft computing techniques for the control of walking robots

An overview is given of some soft computing techniques which have been applied to several walking robots developed at the University of Catania. The first robot described is ROBINSPEC (ROBot for INSPECtion), a robot designed to solve inspection problems in industrial plants with particular application to petrochemical storage tanks. The second project concerns PLIF (Piezo Light Intelligent Flea), a walking micro-robot moved by piezoelectric legs with peculiar features that make it suitable for micro-machining applications and for the study of the collective behaviour of colonies of robots. The two projects have been executed concurrently and independently, adopting two different soft computing approaches.