Artificial Human Balance Control by Calf Muscle Activation Modelling

The natural neuromuscular model has greatly inspired the development of control mechanisms in addressing the uncertainty challenges in robotic systems. Although the underpinning neural reaction of posture control remains unknown, recent studies suggest that muscle activation driven by the nervous system plays a key role in human postural responses to environmental disturbance. Given that the human calf is mainly formed by two muscles, this paper presents an integrated calf control model with the two comprising components representing the activations of the two calf muscles. The contributions of each component towards the artificial control of the calf are determined by their weights, which are carefully designed to simulate the natural biological calf. The proposed calf modelling has also been applied to robotic ankle exoskeleton control. The proposed work was validated and evaluated by both biological and engineering simulation approaches, and the experimental results revealed that the proposed model successfully performed over 92% of the muscle activation naturally made by human participants, and the actions led by the simulated ankle exoskeleton wearers were overall consistent with that by the natural biological response.