Coordinating the Redundant DOFs of Humanoid Robots

The new generation of robots (Industry 5.0 and beyond) is expected to be accompanied by the massive introduction of autonomous and cooperative agents in our society, both in the industrial and service sectors. Cooperation with humans will be simplified by humanoid robots with a similar kinematic outline and a similar kinematic redundancy, which is required by the diversity of tasks that will be performed. A bio-inspired approach is proposed for coordinating the redundant DOFs of such agents. This approach is based on the ideomotor theory of action, combined with the passive motion paradigm, to implicitly address the degrees of freedom problem, without any kinematic inversion, while producing coordinated motor patterns structured according to the typical features of biological motion. At the same time, since the approach is force-field-based, it allows us to integrate in the computational loop parallel modules that exploit the redundancy of the system for satisfying geometric or kinematic constraints implemented by appropriate repulsive force fields. Moreover, the model is expanded to include dynamic constraints associated with the Lagrangian dynamics of the humanoid robot to improve the energetic efficiency of the generated actions.