Development of whole-body humanoid “pneumat-BS” with pneumatic musculoskeletal system

Abstract

The human musculoskeletal system is supposed to play an important role in doing various static and dynamic tasks. From this standpoint, some musculoskeletal humanoid robots have been developed in recent years. However, existing musculoskeletal robots did not have upper body with several DOFs to balance their bodies statically or did not have enough power to perform dynamic tasks. We think the musculoskeletal structure has two significant properties: whole-body flexibility and whole-body coordination. Using these two properties can enable us to make robots' performance better than before. In this study, we developed a humanoid robot with a musculoskeletal system that is driven by pneumatic artificial muscles. To demonstrate the robot's capability in static and dynamic tasks, we conducted two experiments. As a static task, we conducted a standing experiment using a simple feedback control and evaluated the stability by applying an impulse to the robot. As a dynamic task, we conducted a walking experiment using a feedforward controller with human muscle activation patterns and confirmed that the robot was able to perform the dynamic task.