Development of Artificial Muscle Spindle and Realization of Local Reflex for Muscular-Skeletal Humanoids

2016 Fiscal Year Final Research Report

• Project/Area Number: 15K12118
• Research Category: Grant-in-Aid for Challenging Exploratory Research
• Allocation Type: Multi-year Fund
• Research Field: Intelligent robotics
• Research Institution: Osaka University
• Principal Investigator: Hosoda Koh 大阪大学, 基礎工学研究科, 教授 (10252610)
• Project Period (FY): 2015-04-01 – 2017-03-31
• Keywords: 人工筋 / 人工筋紡錘 / 局所的反射 / 筋骨格ヒューマノイド

Outline of Final Research Achievements

For investigating function of local reflexes by using a humanoid robot driven by artificial muscles, we have developed artificial muscle spindles to observe the state of the artificial muscles. The artificial muscle spindle consists of local receptors that observe the state of the muscle and a local computing device that can generate emulated response of the living muscle based on the measurement of the receptors. By utilizing such artificial muscle spindles, we can easily realize the local feedback for muscular-skeletal humanoid robots. For example, we demonstrated that the lateral inhibition of stretch reflex greatly contribute to the stabilization of jumping.

Free Research Field

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