Constructing Constraint Force Field in Musculoskeletal Robot by Co-optimizing Muscle Arrangements and Constant Activations

Abstract

Robots with high-precision motion and operation ability are of great application significance. By referring to the biomechanical structure and neural control mechanism of human motion system, the research of musculoskeletal robot system with rigid-flexible coupling characteristics is one of the important ways to improve the operation flexibility and control robustness of robot. Inspired by the equilibrium point hypothesis proposed in neuroscience, this paper proposes a co-optimization algorithm of muscle arrangement and activation to construct constraint force field in the workspace of musculoskeletal robot. When the muscle arrangement is rough due to the insufficient precision of the mechanical structure, the musculoskeletal robot can maintain accurate motion with the help of constraint force field by adopting the optimized constant activation. Experiments are carried out on a musculoskeletal robot model with human-mimetic muscle to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm in movement accuracy, noise robustness and generalization. This work may be of great significance for the further introduction of constraint force field into hardware system of musculoskeletal robot.