Control Force Recalculation for Balancing Problems

Understanding the mechanism of human balancing is a scientifically challenging task. In order to describe the nature of the underlying control mechanism, the control force has to be determined experimentally. A main feature of balancing tasks is that the open-loop system is unstable. Therefore, reconstruction of the trajectories using the measured control force is difficult, since measurement inaccuracies, noise and numerical errors increase exponentially with time.

In order to overcome this problem, a new approach is proposed in this paper. In the presented technique, first the solution of the linearized system is used. As a second step, an optimization problem is solved which is based on a variational principle. A main advantage of the method is that there is no need for the numerical differentiation of the measured data for the calculation of the control forces, which is the main source of the numerical errors. The method is demonstrated in case of a human stick balancing.