Initial Study Toward Motion Generation by Autonomous Decentralized Control for Peristaltic Mixing and Conveying Device Imitating Intestines

We have developed a peristaltic mixing and conveying device that mimics the human intestine. The device is composed of unit units, making it highly scalable. However, centralized control cannot fully demonstrate the high scalability. Therefore, we focused on autonomous decentralized control. In general, autonomous decentralized control can be expected to improve scalability and fault tolerance. In our previous study, we focused on autonomous decentralized control of human intestines and proposed an autonomous control law, but there was room for improvement in scalability. The objective of this study is to design a “discrepancy function,” which is one of the design theories of autonomous decentralized control, to improve its industrial characteristics. In this paper, we design a term that coordinates the supply and exhaust states of neighboring units to design a discrepancy function, and confirm that it generates motion with the desired phase difference and improves scalability.