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Contribution Details

Type Journal Article
Scope Discipline-based scholarship
Title Biologically inspired kinematic synergies enable linear balance control of a humanoid robot
Organization Unit
Authors
  • Helmut Hauser
  • Gerhard Neumann
  • Auke J Ijspeert
  • Wolfgang Maass
Item Subtype Original Work
Refereed Yes
Status Published in final form
Language
  • English
Journal Title Biological Cybernetics
Publisher Springer
Geographical Reach international
ISSN 0340-1200
Volume 104
Number 4-5
Page Range 235 - 249
Date 2011
Abstract Text 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.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1007/s00422-011-0430-1
Other Identification Number merlin-id:5054
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