Autonomous Decision Making in a Bioinspired Adaptive Robotic Anchoring Module

This paper proposes a bioinspired adaptive anchoring module that can be integrated into robots to enhance their mobility and manipulation abilities. The design of the module is inspired by the structure of the mouth in Chilean lamprey (Mordacia lapicida) where a combination of suction and several arrays of teeth with different sizes around the mouth opening is used for catching preys and anchoring onto them. The module can deploy a suitable mode of attachment, via teeth or vacuum suction, to different contact surfaces in response to the textural properties of those surfaces. In order to make a decision on the suitable mode of attachment, an original dataset of 500 images of outdoor and indoor surfaces was used to train a visual surface examination model using YOLOv3; a virtually real-time object detection algorithm. The mean average precision of the trained model was calculated to be 91%. We have conducted a series of pull-out tests to characterize the module's strength of attachments. The results of the experiments indicate that the anchoring module can withstand an applied detachment force of up to 70N and 30N when attached using teeth and vacuum suction, respectively.