Biologically-inspired humanoid postural control

This article presents a biologically-inspired framework for humanoid postural control. It complies with the main features of human postural control that are extracted from recent studies. In this article, the human body is abstracted as a single-inverted pendulum jointed with a foot that rests freely on a supporting surface. In particular, disturbances affecting posture are addressed and accommodated within the proposed framework. Among these are external forces and motion of support surface on which the body stands. The main components of this framework are: 1. A state-feedback mechanism for stabilizing the unstable dynamics of the body. 2. A tracking loop for robustly achieving desired voluntary orientations. 3. A feed-forward control primarily for improving the response to voluntary motions. 4. A stand-alone vestibular sensory fusion algorithm for estimating body orientation. 5. An external-disturbance estimator and a corresponding compensation for minimizing the effect of external disturbances. These components are interconnected in a way that qualifies this framework to modularly address the multi-segment body postural control problem. Although no postural stability measure is explicitly incorporated, experiments run on a special-purpose humanoid demonstrate the stability and the performance merits of the presented framework.