Self-stabilizing human-like motion control framework for humanoids using neural oscillators

Abstract

We propose an efficient and powerful alternative for adaptation of human motions to humanoid robots keeping the bipedal stability. For achieving a stable and robust whole body motion of humanoid robots, we design a biologically inspired control framework based on neural oscillators. Entrainments of neural oscillators play a key role to adapt the nervous system to the natural frequency of the interacted environments, which show superior features when coupled with virtual components. The coupled system allows an unstable system to stably move according to environmental changes. Hence the feature of the coupled system can be exploited for sustaining the bipedal stability of humanoid robots. Also based on this, a marionette-type motion conversion method to adapt captured motions to a humanoid robot is developed owing that there are the differences in capabilities of dynamics and kinematics between a robot and a human. Then this paper discuss on how to stably show human motions with a humanoid robot. We verify that a real humanoid robot can successfully sustain the bipedal stability exhibiting captured whole body motions from various simulations and experiments. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.