2007 Fiscal Year Final Research Report Summary
Research on emergence mechanism of voluntary motion in locomotion and modeling of locomotion control
| Project/Area Number |
17500108
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| Research Category |
Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C)
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| Allocation Type | Single-year Grants |
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| Section | 一般 |
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| Research Field |
Perception information processing/Intelligent robotics
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| Research Institution | Osaka Institute of Technology |
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Principal Investigator |
TSUJITA Katsuyoshi Osaka Institute of Technology, Department of Electrical and Electronic Systems Engineering, Associate Professor (20252603)
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| Project Period (FY) |
2005 – 2007
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| Keywords | Intelligent robotics / Dynamic and Control / System engineering / Cognitive science / Medical use Welfare |
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| Research Abstract |
This study discusses the control of locomotion, with an emphasis on dynamic gait transition with an adaptation to the environment and voluntary motions in locomotion.
Biological research over the last few years has made great contributions to overcoming such difficulties. During spontaneous motion such as walking straight, many joints and muscles are organized into a collective unit that is controlled as though it had fewer degrees of freedom (DOFs), but that still needs to retain the necessary flexibility for changing environments. During voluntary motion, on the other hand, such as in turning walks, another organized collective unit emerges selectively according to the commanded signal.
Leg motions in locomotion have two essential stages. One is the swinging stage and the other is the supporting stage. In the swinging stage, the actuator forces are relaxed; the joints become less stiff and more passive. In the supporting stage, stiffness of the joints increases due to forces generated
… More
by the antagonistic pair of actuators. By controlling and tuning the stiffness of the joints through the balanced adjustment of the generated force of such a pair of actuators, the robot is expected to become more adaptive to variations in the environment and in the surface of the ground. The idea of the architecture of tones control of the actuators is inspired by the biological studies.
In this study, a new system is proposed for controlling the gait transition by choosing a quadruped robot for example with nonlinear oscillators. Development of an oscillator controller for quadruped robots with antagonistic pairs of pneumatic actuators is shown in this paper. It consists of a spontaneous locomotion controller and a voluntary tones controller. The spontaneous locomotion controller is designed as an oscillator network that has mutual interactions among oscillators with feedback signals from external sensors. The dynamic interactions make possible mutual entrainments between oscillators and create a steady limit cycle of the total periodic dynamics of quadruped locomotion.
The voluntary tones controller, on the other hand, controls the posture of the main body according to locomotion speed and body state. Monitoring the locomotion speed and the amplitude of the rolling motion and pitching motion of the main body, the stiffness of the trunk, especially the joint stiffness of the spine are controlled to stabilize and reduce the divergence of the amplitude of rolling and pitching motion of the main body to keep the posture. To the results, the dynamic interactions of the periodic motions of the legs through the motion of the main body changes according to the dynamic state of the system, and appropriate gait pattern emerges according to the locomotion speed and body motion.
The performance of the proposed control system was verified to be good through numerical simulations and hardware experiments. The result of this study shows the effectiveness of the proposed system. Less
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Research Products
(39 results)
