Common dimensional autoencoder for identifying agonist-antagonist muscle pairs in musculoskeletal robots

Abstract

One of the distinctive features of musculoskeletal systems is the redundancy provided by agonist-antagonist muscle pairs. To identify agonist-antagonist muscle pairs in a musculoskeletal robot, however, is difficult as it requires complex structures to mimic human physiology. Thus, we propose a method to identify agonist-antagonist muscle pairs in a complex musculoskeletal robot using motor commands. Moreover, the common dimensional autoencoder, where the encoded feature has identical dimensions to the original input vector, is used to separate the image and the kernel spaces for each time period. Finally, we successfully confirmed the efficacy of our method by applying a 2-link planar manipulator to a 3-pairs-6-muscles configuration.