Abstract
Recently, it has been widely recognized that control and mechanical systems cannot be designed separately due to their tight interdependency. However, there still leaves much to be understood about 1) how the relationship between control and mechanical systems should be; and 2) what does the "well- balanced coupling" between these two systems bring to resulting behavior? In light of these facts, as an initial step toward this goal, this study intensively discusses the coupling from the view point of the "temporal" contribution of control and mechanical systems to the resulting behavior. To this end, this study proposes a pulsed-CPG that allows us to change the brain-body interaction adaptively according to the situation encountered. In order to verify the feasibility of our proposed method, we implement the pulsed-CPG to a walking biped as a practical example. Preliminary results support that discrete control strategy by using a pulsed-CPG, which effectively exploits diversity of motion trajectory, enables to enhance the robustness against external perturbation.
