Muscle-tendon complex control by “Tension controlled Muscle” and “Non-linear Spring Ligament” for real world musculoskeletal body simulator Kenshiro

This paper presents a control approach to express muscle-tendon complex in a musculoskeletal humanoid robot. Kenshiro is a full body tendon driven humanoid robot and is designed from the data of average 14 year old Japanese boy. By winding wires by motors we can express the contraction of muscles, and in this paper we introduce novel actuation system realized by integrating “Tension controlled Muscle(TCM)” and “Non-linear Spring Ligament(NSL)”. Combination of active and passive compliance control is explained in this paper to realize the behavior of muscle-tendon complex(MTC). This enables flexible behavior of Kenshiro, and mimic joint trajectory of human when external force is applied. At the same time the tension data of the load cells can be regarded as muscle tension. In this way it becomes possible to use musculoskeletal humanoid robots for measuring biological data quantitatively. Application of Kenshiro as actively movable car crash simulation mannequin is illustrated by an example as a future work.