Abstract
The living system is thought to be one of the benchmarks for an inspiration of the artificial things, e.g. robotics, biomimetics. If we could understand the living system, we should reconstruct it by mechanical stuff. The gait analysis of normal and pathological function have been studied for the intervention to walking disruptions following neuromuscular diseases. The purpose of this study is to develop the musculoskeletal walking simulator, which actually walks with the similar coordination pattern to the neurotypical human walking. Human walking appears coodinated and efficient, and effortless. The biped robot consisted of two-dimensional motion of hip, knee and ankle pin joint. The typical muscles attributing to normal walking were altered by simple springs because the efficient walking meant spring energy change and discharge cycles. The arrangement of the muscles was almost represented in the robot. Then, the robot regenerated the walking like motion patterns without any interventions. The selected two proximal muscles per leg were altered by spring and driving motor, whose were connected serially. Although we required several fine modulations of each spring stiffness and relating moment arms, the walking simulator could walk by an appropriate on-off stimulation pattern of the muscles, which thought to be similar to the EMG pattern in normal human walking. The coordination of the walking of the robot was evaluated by the angle detectors of each joint. The result showed a similar coordination pattern to the normal human walking.
