Distributed control for an anthropomimetic robot

Michael Jäntsch, Steffen Wittmeier, Alois C. Knoll

Abstract: Major progress in robotics turns today's humanoid robots into ever safer, more robust, and more agile agents by the moment. However, it is still a long way until robots can safely operate in open environments. Especially in the area of service robotics, the need arises for robots to work flexibly in a human centered environment. One way towards this goal is to incorporate more and more of the mechanisms that can be found in humans for our robots. In this work we would like to propose a bio-inspired control architecture for an equally bio-inspired - namely anthropomimetic - humanoid robot. To achieve this, the human motor control system is analyzed and copied at a structural level. This results in a distributed control infrastructure that is capable of reducing the complexity of the control task by off-loading parts of the control problem into the robot's limbs. Finally, we will prove the fact that it is possible to control an anthropomimetic robot with a large number of degrees of freedom with the proposed control architecture.