抄録
The control and mechanical systems of an embodied agent should be tightly coupled so that useful functionalities such as adaptivity can emerge. This indicates that the mechanical system as well as the control system should be capable of a certain level of "computation" for generating the behavior. However, the extent to which "computational offloading" from the control system to the mechanical system should be achieved requires further clarification. In order to effectively consider this, we herein focus on motion primitives as building blocks for the generation of behavior and investigate how synergetic activation patterns of muscles influence the stability of bipedal walking. To this end, we have developed a walking biped with artificial monoarticular and biarticular muscles. Through the preliminary experiments, we found that "retraction" motion, which is activated by the intrinsic dynamics originated from biarticular muscles just before the grounding, plays a remarkably important role as to the stability of walking.
