An engineering biologically-inspired approach for understanding and reconstructing human postural control

This paper presents an engineering approach for understanding and reconstructing the human postural control. This approach is inspired by biological and neurological findings that are discussed here. The presented control architecture is composed of an extended observer that can estimate unknown external stimuli based on a dynamic model, a static compensation mechanism, and a linear PID controller with the possibility of introducing PD feed-forward terms. Experiments on a special-purpose humanoid robot show the applicability of the presented architecture in terms of stabilizing the system and tracking a desired voluntary motion in the presence of superimposed external stimuli. Although theoretically a big set of individual sensor combinations can be employed for estimation, using the vestibular sensors demonstrates a particularly robust estimation.