Toward Developing a Computational Model for Bipedal Push Recovery–A Brief

Abstract

The human being can negotiate with external push up to certain extent reactively. Grown up persons have better push recovery capability than kids and also the professional wrestlers acquire better push recovery capability than normal human being. The acquired push recovery capability, therefore, is based on learning. However, the mechanism of learning is not known to us. Researchers around the world are trying to explore this mystery through developing various models and implementing them on various humanoid robots. All the models based on conventional mechanics and controls have inherent limitations. We believe appropriate computational model based on learning will be able to effectively address this issue. Accordingly, we have collected extensively humanoid push recovery data using our innovative idea of exploiting the accelerometer sensor of smart phone. Through our experiments, we have studied the human push recovery by fusing data at feature level using physics toolbar accelerometer of android interface kit. The subjects for the experiments were selected both as right handed and left handed. Pushes were induced from the behind with close eyes to observe the motor action as well as with open eyes to observe learning-based reactive behaviors. A learning vector quantization-based classifier has been developed to identify the coordination between various push and hip and knee joints.