Describes a biologically-inspired control architecture for the McKibben actuated limbs of a humanoid robot. The antagonistically driven joints are actuated using a biological control model observed in the measurement of human muscle electromyograms (EMG) during reaching movements in the vertical plane. The paradigm uses the summation of tonic and phasic EMG signals to activate the human muscles. The humanoid robot's muscles, actuated by pressure control, are controlled with feedforward pressure patterns analogous to the tonic and phasic activation in the human model. Proprioceptive feedback is utilized in the control architecture to correct for misperceived loading conditions and time variance of the actuators. The control architecture, initial experimental results, and experiments are discussed in the paper. A result of this control paradigm is the realization of actuation with lower stiffness and therefore safer operation for human-humanoid interaction. It is expected that such a motion of the humanoid will closely resemble human motion and will facilitate a more human-friendly human-robot interaction.
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