Design of Central Pattern Generators (CPGs) for Trajectory Tracking of Fish-Mimetic Robots

A CPG (Central Pattern Generator) is a biological neural network that generates rhythmic movements for locomotion of animals, such as walking, running, swimming and flying. Also, fish show marvelous ability of autonomous dynamic adaptation for an unsteady fluid dynamic environment or various environments. These biological concepts are utilized to mimic animals in engineering fields. The main objective of this paper is to generate a joint motion of the fish-mimetic robot by CPG, which is biological approach, in order to follow the desired trajectory. We propose a 3-DOF CPG controller to track the trajectory of the fish robot in a plane motion. The conformity of the proposed control algorithm is validated by simulation for a fish robot model with unsteady fluid characteristics.