What are the Fundamentals of Bio-Mimetic Control?

Abstract

This article explores the fundamentals of biomimetic control through investigating three interesting but difficult problems of robot control: 1) robotic handwriting; 2) human-like multijoints reaching with surplus DOFs (degrees-of-freedom); and 3) prehension of an object by a pair of multiDOFs robot fingers. Noteworthy characteristics in control of these systems are a) redundancy in DOF, b) dexterity in execution of a target task, and c) indispensability of sensory motor coordination, though d) all their dynamics are nonlinear and governed by geometric constraints in the latter two systems. Due to these inherent characteristics, both the conventional control-theoretic approaches originated from the linear system theory and Lyapunov's direct method are likely to fail. By gaining physical insights into these nonlinear dynamics with redundancy in DOFs and physical descriptions of target tasks, this article claims that a symbiosis of robotics and biomimetics is quite effective in finding a simpler sensor-motor coordination principle in each case that leads to accomplishment of each imposed task regardless of annoying characteristics of its motion dynamics with nonlinearity and DOF redundancy