Designing Synergistic Walking of a Whole-Body Humanoid Driven by Pneumatic Artificial Muscles: An Empirical Study

Our body consists of many body parts that are compliantly connected with each other by muscles and ligaments, and their behavior emerges out of the synergy of the whole-body dynamics. Such synergistic behavior generation is supposed to contribute to human adaptive movement such as walking. This paper describes designing synergistic walking of a whole-body humanoid robot whose joints are driven by artificial pneumatic muscles antagonistically. We propose to take an incremental design approach to deal with the complicated dynamics of the system. As a result, we can determine control parameters that govern whole-body behavior. We experimentally demonstrate that the humanoid walks stably with a simple limit-cycle controller. (C) Koninklijke Brill NV. Leiden and The Robotics Society of Japan. 2008