Human-Likeness Indicator for Robot Posture Control and Balance

Similarly to humans, humanoid robots require posture control and balance to walk and interact with the environment. In this work posture control in perturbed conditions is evaluated as a performance test for humanoid control. A specific performance indicator is proposed: the score is based on the comparison between the body sway of the tested humanoid standing on a moving surface and the sway produced by healthy subjects performing the same experiment. This approach is here oriented to the evaluation of a human-likeness. The measure is tested using a humanoid robot in order to demonstrate a typical usage of the proposed evaluation scheme and an example of how to improve robot control on the basis of such a performance indicator score