Development of Musculoskeletal Robot Arms

Human's musculoskeletal structures are very complex and they look problems that make their control very difficult in terms of robotics. In this research, we however assume that their musculoskeletal structure must have advantages to realize highly sophisticated human's motions because they have been optimized throughout evolution. In particular, we are focusing on the superior limb and developing musculoskeletal robot arms to reveal and exploit their unknown functions.

Reference

• Arne Hitzmann, Hiroaki Masuda, Shuhei ikemoto, and Koh Hosoda, "Anthropomorphic Musculoskeletal ten degrees-of-freedom Robot Arm driven by Pneumatic Artificial Muscles", Advanced Robotics, Vol. 32, Issue 15, pp. 865-878, 2018.
• Koh Hosoda, Shunsuke Sekimoto, Yoichi Nishigori, Shinya Takamuku, and Shuhei Ikemoto, "Anthropomorphic Muscular-Skeletal Robotic Upper Limb For Understanding Embodied Intelligence", Advanced Robotics, Vol. 26, No. 7, pp. 729-744, 2012.

Door Opening Motion exploiting Inherent Flexibility provided by Pneumatic Artificial Muscles

When we open a door, do we accurately measure the 3D position or accurately model the mechanical constraints? In this research, we showed that a very simple control is still possible to open the door if the musucloskeletal robot arm has a humanlike musculoskeleta structure driven by flexible pneumatic artificial muscles without the accurate mesuring and modeling. In addition, we confirmed that pressure and tension data of pneumatic artificial muscles contain information of the door's state such as whether or not the door is unlocked.

Reference

• Koh Hosoda, Shunsuke Sekimoto, Yoichi Nishigori, Shinya Takamuku, and Shuhei Ikemoto, "Anthropomorphic Muscular-Skeletal Robotic Upper Limb For Understanding Embodied Intelligence", Advanced Robotics, Vol. 26, No. 7, pp. 729-744, 2012.
• Shuhei Ikemoto, Yoichi Nishigori, and Koh Hosoda, "Advantages of flexible musculoskeletal robot structure in sensory acquisition", Artificial Life and Robotics, Vol. 17, No. 1, pp. 63-69, 2012.

Dynamic Throwing Motion using Humanlike Shoulder Complex Mechanism

A shoulder complex has one of most complex structures in a human's superior limb. In this research, we developed the wider range-of-motion spherical joint and the sliding scapula mechanism to mimic the human shoulder complex mechanism. The developed musculoskeletal arm with humanlike shoulder complex mechanism could have a wide range of motion and throw a ball dynamically as the same as that of humans.

Reference

• Shuhei Ikemoto, Yuya Kimoto, and Koh Hosoda, "Shoulder Complex Linkage Mechanism for Humanlike Musculoskeletal Robot Arms", Bioinspiration & Biomimetics, Vol. 10, No. 6, doi: 10.1088/1748-3190/10/6/066009, 2015.
• Shuhei Ikemoto, Yuya Kimoto and Koh Hosoda, "Surface EMG-based Posture Control of Shoulder Complex Linkage Mechanism", IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, 2015.
• Shuhei Ikemoto, Fumiya Kannou and Koh Hosoda, "Humanlike shoulder complex for musculoskeletal robot arms", IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, 2012.

Direct Teaching Method for Musculoskeletal Robots driven by Pneumatic Artificial Muscles

Direct teaching is a method which a teacher directly move a robot to indicate desired motions. It is normally done by measuring the robot's posture in each time instance and giving them as the desired values of the feedback posture controller. However, to measure muscle lenghts of developed musucloskeletal robot arms is very difficult due to their complexity. In this research, we proposed the direct teaching method specialized for musculoskeletal robots driven by pneumatic artificial muscles which measures pressures and tentions of muscules instead of their lengths and compute desired pressures without measuring and estimating their lengths.

Reference

• Shuhei Ikemoto, Yuji Kayano and Koh Hosoda, "Active Behavior of Musculoskeletal Robot Arms driven by Pneumatic Artificial Muscles for Receiving Human’s Direct Teaching Effectively", IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, 2014.
• Shuhei Ikemoto, Yoichi Nishigori and Koh Hosoda, "Direct Teaching Method for Musculoskeletal Robots driven by Pneumatic Artificial Muscles", IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, 2012.