Providing the technical means to prevent collapse or falls in patients with different types of pathology in motion and balance control is one of the traditional problems in rehabilitation engineering. A means of addressing the problem using assistive devices, including prostheses, is to restrict the mobility in certain anatomical or artificial joints by applying corsets, braces, brakes and lock...

This paper describes the hardware and software design of the kidsize humanoid robot systems of the Darmstadt Dribblers in 2009. The robots are used as a vehicle for research in control of locomotion and behavior of autonomous humanoid robots and robot teams with many degrees of freedom and many actuated joints. The Humanoid League of RoboCup provides an ideal testbed for such aspects of dynamic...

In this paper, humanoid gait generation is formulated as a multi-objective optimization problem with multiconstraint based on probability distribution models. Under this framework, an estimation of distribution algorithm (EDA) based gait optimization approach has been developed to speed up searching in high dimensional coupling space constructed by the permutation of optimization parameters to ...

Communicative behaviors are a very important aspect of human behavior, and deserve special attention when simulating groups and crowds of virtual pedestrians. Previous approaches have tended to focus on generating believable gestures for individual characters and talker-listener behaviors for static groups. In this paper, we consider the problem of creating rich and varied conversational behavi...

Estimation of the gravitational vertical is a fundamental problem faced by locomoting biological systems and robots alike. A robotic model of a vestibular system is suggested with the purpose of explaining an observed phenomenon—head stabilization during locomotion. The mechanical model of the vestibular system comprises a damped inclinometer and an inertial measurement unit which are mounted o...

Actively articulated locomotion systems such as hybrid wheel-legged vehicles are a possible way to enhance the locomotion performance of autonomous mobile robot. In this paper, we address the control of the wheel-legged robot Hylos evolving on irregular sloping terrain.The redundancy involved in such system is used to optimize both the balance of traction forces and the tipover stability. The g...

In this paper, the authors describe the design and control of RHex, a power autonomous, untethered, compliant-legged hexapod robot. RHex has only six actuators—one motor located at each hip—achieving mechanical simplicity that promotes reliable and robust operation in real-world tasks. Empirically stable and highly maneuverable locomotion arises from a very simple clock-driven, openloop tripod ...

In this paper the issue of locomotion control in bio-inspired hexapod structures is considered as a problem of convergence toward flow invariant subspaces in networks of mutually and locally coupled neural units. Since the network topologies used refer to undirected diffusive tree graphs, in this case a unique gain value on the graph connection matrix can be found to guarantee exponential conve...

In this paper, we address the problem of animating and controlling the locomotion of bodies which are propelled by pulse-like and periodic muscle activation. This kind of locomotion mode is encountered in a variety of real animals and an even larger variety of imaginary creatures could be propelled in this way. We propose a step-by-step methodology for the design of feedback controllers that ca...

The human interaction with new kind of machines has made possible the development of new technics to drive and control devices in the robotics field. Specifically, on the control systems for walking machines there are several problems to be solved. Some of these problems are the free locomoction gaits. In this paper are shown the basic principles involved in the desing of free gaits to develop ...