*New biomimetic soft robot legs.
(...)
"The research appears on Friday in a peer-reviewed publication, the Journal of Neural Engineering.
"The sensors are one component in a triple system that aims at imitating the human gait, which has been honed by millions of years of evolution to be as smooth and energy-efficient as our anatomy will allow.
"The "skeleton" of the legs copies the three joints in the lower anatomy – the hips, knees and ankles – and the muscles are straps, which move up and down as actuators.
The actual movements are determined by an electronic imitation of the central pattern generator (CPG), a neural network in the lower region of the spine that is semi-autonomous from the brain.
"The CPG generates rhythmic muscle signals after gathering information from various parts of the body that respond to the environment. This explains why we can walk without having to think about it.
"We combined the three elements, the biomechanics and a complex central pattern generator with sensory feedback," Lewis said in an interview with AFP.
"When we put all three together, the resultant movement was very much like a human being's..."
(((Robot tactility.)))
Robots Get A Feel For The World from USC Viterbi on Vimeo.
Robots Get A Feel For The World
by USC Viterbi PLUS 4 weeks 2 days ago
"What does a robot feel when it touches something? Little or nothing until now. Researchers at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering publish a study in Frontiers in Neurorobotics showing that specially designed robots can be taught to feel even more than humans."
