Human upright posture is an unstable position: Continuous activation of postural muscles is required to avoid falling down. This is the output of a complex control system that monitors a very large number of inputs, related to the orientation of the body segments, to produce an adequate output as muscle activation. Complexity arises because of the very large number of correlated inputs and outp...

A new 3D biped prototype with small DOF, SKIPPER, was developed. As an important component of a running controller for this robot, an aerial posture controller is presented. This is the extended version of planar running controller, which was previously developed for a passive one-legged hopping robot, and plays important roll for orbital stabilization at the lowest control layer. The controlle...

In recent years, several researches are being done to improve the means by which humans interact with machines. Having developed a variety of input devices, we still are not completely comfortable with the present human–machine interaction processes. This stirred up the efforts undertaken to make the machines adapt to the human’s natural means of communication which are speech and body language...

A phenomenological model of human posture control is posited. The dynamics are modelled as an elastically pinned polymer under the innuence of noise. The model accurately reproduces the two-point correlation function of experimental posture data and makes predictions for the response function of the postural control system. The physiological and clinical signiicance of the model is discussed.

Individuals with upper-limb amputations may currently use artificial limbs controlled with signals from their residual muscles. Pattern recognition, one type of advanced control, uses the patterns produced by several muscles to control prosthesis movements. This article describes a new way to test this control by using a virtual environment performance test called the Target Achievement Control...

Accurately maintaining a fixed limb posture and quickly moving between postures underlies both everyday skills, including holding and lifting a cup of coffee, and expert skills, such as an Olympic wrestler’s holding and throwing an opponent. A fundamental question in limb motor control is whether the brain manages these contrasting goals of posture and movement through a single, robust control ...

A phenomenological model of human posture control is posited. The dynamics are modelled as an elastically pinned polymer under the innuence of noise. The model accurately reproduces the two-point correlation function of experimental posture data and makes predictions for the response function of the postural control system. The physiological and clinical signiicance of the model is discussed.

The output of the human postural control system is highly irregular, even under quiet-standing conditions. To describe the observed dynamics of human posture control, we propose a simple, analytical stochastic model, consisting of a pinned polymer. For such a system, there exists a uctuation-dissipation theorem (FDT), which provides a linear relationship between the correlations of the system a...

A phenomenological model of human posture control is posited. The dynamics are modelled as an elastically pinned polymer under the innuence of noise. The model accurately reproduces the two-point correlation function of experimental posture data and makes predictions for the response function of the postural control system. The physiological and clinical signiicance of the model is discussed.

Considering rather severe parametric uncertainties and nonlinear uncertainties exist in the dynamic model of pneumatic muscles driven parallel manipulator, a discontinuous projection-based adaptive robust control strategy (ARC) is adopted to effectively handle the effect of various parameter variations of the system and hard-to-model nonlinearities such as the friction forces of the pneumatic m...