Sensory Adaptation in Human Balance Control: Lessons for Biomimetic Robotic Bipeds

This paper describes mechanisms used by humans to stand on moving platforms, such as a bus or ship, and to combine body orientation and motion information from multiple sensors including vision, vestibular, and proprioception. A simple mechanism, sensory re-weighting, has been proposed to explain how human subjects learn to reduce the effects of a moving support platform on balance. Our goal is to replicate this robust balance behavior in bipedal robots. We present results exploring sensory re-weighting in humans, simulation, and in a robot implementation.