Modeling and simulating compliant movements in a musculoskeletal Bipedal robot

This paper describes the modeling and the simulation of a novel Elastic Bipedal Robot based on Human Musculoskeletal modeling. The geometrical organization of the robot artificial muscles is based on the organization of human muscles. In this paper we study how the robot active and passive elastic actuation structures develop force during selected motor tasks, and how we can model the contact between feet and ground. We then compare the robot dynamics to that of the human during the same motor tasks. The motivation behind this study is to reduce the development time by using a simulation environment for the purpose of developing a bipedal robot that takes advantage of the mechanisms underlying the human musculoskeletal dynamics for the generation of natural movement. © 2012 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.