Biologically Inspired Model for Timed Motion in Robotic Systems
This work addresses the challenge of temporal stabilization in robotic motion, which is crucial for naturalistic humanoid interactions and adaptive planning, though it is incremental as it builds on existing biological insights and standard methods like EKF and Hopf oscillators.
The authors tackled the problem of generating timed, naturalistic motion in robotic systems by developing a biologically inspired model that combines an extended Kalman filter for target prediction with a Hopf oscillator for temporal stabilization, achieving isochronous behavior in simulations and on a physical robot for intercepting moving targets in 3D space.
The goal of this work is the development of a motion model for sequentially timed movement actions in robotic systems under specific consideration of temporal stabilization, that is maintaining an approximately constant overall movement time (isochronous behavior). This is demonstrated both in simulation and on a physical robotic system for the task of intercepting a moving target in three-dimensional space. Motivated from humanoid motion, timing plays a vital role to generate a naturalistic behavior in interaction with the dynamic environment as well as adaptively planning and executing action sequences on-line. In biological systems, many of the physiological and anatomical functions follow a particular level of periodicity and stabilization, which exhibit a certain extent of resilience against external disturbances. A main aspect thereof is stabilizing movement timing against limited perturbations. Especially human arm movement, namely when it is tasked to reach a certain goal point, pose or configuration, shows a stabilizing behavior. This work incorporates the utilization of an extended Kalman filter (EKF) which was implemented to predict the target position while coping with non-linear system dynamics. The periodicity and temporal stabilization in biological systems was artificially generated by a Hopf oscillator, yielding a sinusoidal velocity profile for smooth and repeatable motion.