Paper Info
Title
Biologically inspired kinematic synergies enable linear balance control of a humanoid robot.
Abstract
Despite many efforts, balance control of humanoid robots in the presence of unforeseen external or internal forces has remained an unsolved problem. The difficulty of this problem is a consequence of the high dimensionality of the action space of a humanoid robot, due to its large number of degrees of freedom (joints), and of non-linearities in its kinematic chains. Biped biological organisms face similar difficulties, but have nevertheless solved this problem. Experimental data reveal that many biological organisms reduce the high dimensionality of their action space by generating movements through linear superposition of a rather small number of stereotypical combinations of simultaneous movements of many joints, to which we refer as kinematic synergies in this paper. We show that by constructing two suitable non-linear kinematic synergies for the lower part of the body of a humanoid robot, balance control can in fact be reduced to a linear control problem, at least in the case of relatively slow movements. We demonstrate for a variety of tasks that the humanoid robot HOAP-2 acquires through this approach the capability to balance dynamically against unforeseen disturbances that may arise from external forces or from manipulating unknown loads.
Year
DOI
Venue
2011
10.1007/s00422-011-0430-1
Biological Cybernetics
Keywords
Field
DocType
Kinematic synergies,Humanoid robot,Balance control,Biologically inspired,Motion primitives
Superposition principle,Kinematics,Internal forces,Control theory,Postural Balance,Control engineering,Curse of dimensionality,Artificial intelligence,Robotics,Mathematics,Humanoid robot,Biomechanical Phenomena
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
104
4-5
1432-0770
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
10
0.57
14
Authors
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Helmut Hauser11139.00
Neumann, Gerhard251141.51
Auke Jan Ijspeert33546282.93
Wolfgang Maass43717391.51