Development of a flexible autonomous robot without sensors or controllers

Recently, various robots with many degrees of freedom, such as rescue robots and domestic robots, have been developed and used in practical applications. It is difficult to control such robots autonomously in real environments, because in order to control the many degrees of freedom, we have to observe many states, calculate huge amounts of information, and operate many actuators. In this study, we consider a flexible robot without sensors or controllers that can determine the inclination of a slope and climb up the slope. In order to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework, we have developed a prototype robot and conducted experiments. The result indicates that the robot could determine the inclination and climb up a gentle slope autonomously. Thus, we have realized an autonomous robot that has no explicit sensors or controllers.