13 accepted papers
Pneumatic artificial muscles (PAMs) are soft actuators with softness and high power ratio. These characteristics provide a robot with adaptiveness and agility. However, controlling PAMs is difficult because they exhibit a highly nonlinear nature and involve complex multi-physical systems (i.e. mecha
Musculoskeletal quadruped robots driven by pneumatic artificial muscles (PAMs) have great softness. Due to the softness, the proprioceptive information of PAMs (e.g. tension) reflects the environmental information. However, how to utilize this information for stable quadrupedal gait has been rarely…
Musculoskeletal robots hold significant potential for the design of future robots. One of the challenges is the possibility of output delays from the muscles, which may prevent higher centers from compensating during sudden disturbances. The reflex system, widely observed in animals, is viewed as an
As a strategy to address the difficulties encountered when modeling and controlling a musculoskeletal system, we present a straightforward implementation of an autonomous decentralized motion control system in this paper; the system is inspired by the spinal reflex system of animals. We developed an…
We used cells, which are the units that make up a living body, as building blocks to design a biomachine hybrid system and develop a tactile sensor that uses living cells as sensor receptors. We fabricated a novel cell tactile sensor with the electrodes formed using printed electronics technology. T…
There are structural challenges in increasing the softness of conventional soft tactile sensors because rigid electrical elements have to be installed around the sensing areas, which should be compressive, stretchable, and durable. To solve these issues, we propose an inductive tactile sensor whose
It has been widely considered that a distinctive feature of musculoskeletal structures is that both the joint angle and stiffness can be changed by exploiting the agonistantagonist driving of the joint. However, musculoskeletal systems in animals and humans are typically highly complex, and the simp…
Musculoskeletal robots that are based on pneumatic actuation have a variety of properties, such as compliance and back-drivability, that render them particularly appealing for human-robot collaboration. However, programming interactive and responsive behaviors for such systems is extremely challengi…
Motor babbling and goal babbling has been used for sensorimotor learning of highly redundant systems in soft robotics. Recent works in goal babbling have demonstrated successful learning of inverse kinematics (IK) on such systems, and suggest that babbling in the goal space better resolves motor red…
A lot of research has been conducted on swarm and modular robots and their reconfiguration. For this kind of robot system, it is best to simplify each individual module in order to avoid making the swarm system too complex in the interest of reducing the computing power necessary for a task.This pap…
A number of researches have been focusing on the development and control of robots with soft structures such as flexible musculoskeletal systems. Thus far, it has been reported that these robots can achieve high adaptability to environments despite their extremely simple controllers. However, becaus…
The aim of this research is to develop a musculoskeletal robot arm, which has a similar mechanical structure to that of a human, to simply make the robot move similarly to a human based on his/her electromyographic signals. In recent years, many musculoskeletal robots have been developed to show adv…
Humans can walk stably and adaptively in the presence of various environmental changes. Their bodies have very complex musculoskeletal structures that contribute to their walking stability and adaptability. In this paper, we focus on the gluteus medius, one of muscles contributing to the support of…