Computational Intelligence Techniques in Bio-inspired Robotics

Biologically inspired robotics is a rapidly emerging research area standing at the cross-cut of biology, artificial intelligence, and robotics. The structural and functional perfection of the biological creatures achieved through thousands of years of evolution in nature have made them a great source of inspiration for designing complex autonomous systems. Accordingly, robotics researchers have initiated designing artificial machines while considering the characteristics of biological systems as the benchmark knowledge. ‘Biomimetics’, an emerging research area, is a consequence of such initiatives. Bio-inspired robotics is actually a subset of biomimectics focusing mostly on the design of autonomous robots while mimicking the intelligence, cognition, and structural properties of the primates and other lower order species. Computational intelligence techniques developed in the past several years are related closely to bio-inspired robotics as both of them have originated from the common inspiration of mimicking human intelligence, although their development have followed different paths. Bio-inspired robotics have used computational intelligence techniques to mathematically model ‘human-like intelligence behavior’ for autonomous robots. This chapter provides an overview on the tools of computational intelligence and their applications in bio-inspired robotics. It highlights the recent progress made in bio-inspired robotics while giving a special emphasis on the usage of computational intelligence tools to design human-like cognitive abilities in the robotic systems.