Biologically Inspired Robotic Arm Control Using an Artificial Neural Oscillator

We address a neural-oscillator-based control scheme to achieve biologically inspired motion generation. In general, it is known that humans or animals exhibit novel adaptive behaviors regardless of their kinematic configurations against unexpected disturbances or environment changes. This is caused by the entrainment property of the neural oscillator which plays a key role to adapt their nervous system to the natural frequency of the interacted environments. Thus we focus on a self-adapting robot arm control to attain natural adaptive motions as a controller employing neural oscillators. To demonstrate the excellence of entrainment, we implement the proposed control scheme to a single pendulum coupled with the neural oscillator in simulation and experiment. Then this work shows the performance of the robot arm coupled to neural oscillators through various tasks that the arm traces a trajectory. With these, the real-time closed-loop system allowing sensory feedback of the neural oscillator for the entrainment property is proposed. In particular, we verify an impressive capability of biologically inspired self-adaptation behaviors that enables the robot arm to make adaptive motions corresponding to an unexpected environmental variety.