Good Posture, Good Balance: Comparison of Bioinspired and Model-Based Approaches for Posture Control of Humanoid Robots

This article provides a theoretical and thorough experimental comparison of two distinct posture control approaches: (1) a fully model-based control approach and (2) a biologically inspired approach derived from human observations. While the robotic approach can easily be applied to balancing in three-dimensional (3-D) and multicontact (MC) situations, the biologically inspired balancer currently only works in two-dimensional situations but shows interesting robustness properties under time delays in the feedback loop. This is an important feature when considering the signal transmission and processing properties in the human sensorimotor system. Both controllers were evaluated in a series of experiments with a torque-controlled humanoid robot (TORO). This article concludes with some suggestions for the improvement of model-based balancing approaches in robotics.