Effect of biarticular muscles for vertical jumping of muscle-driven leg robot

One of the effective strategies for designing a muscle-driven humanoid robot that obtains dynamic motion such as jumping is by referring arrangement of muscles in the human body. In order to design a robot that realizes higher performance for vertical jumping, a robot that has hip, knee, and ankle joint equipping not only six monoarticular muscles but also three biarticular muscles is adopted, and the effect of the biarticular muscles on vertical jumping is investigated. In the experiment, robots with/without biarticular muscles are adopted, and an optimized parameter set including the firing period and delay of each muscle is searched using a stochastic searching algorithm. By comparing the performance of the two types of robot models under some sets of conditions, we found that the biarticular muscles relatively contribute to the generation of a vertical ground reaction force for a vertical jumping.