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

In this work we present a system identification procedure based on Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) for human posture control models. A usual approach to the study of human posture control consists in the identification of parameters for a control system. In this context, linear models are particularly popular due to the relative simplicity in identifying the required parameters and to analyze the results. Nonlinear models, conversely, are required to predict the real behavior exhibited by human subjects and hence it is desirable to use them in posture control analysis. The use of CNN aims to overcome the heavy computational requirement for the identification of nonlinear models, in order to make the analysis of experimental data less time consuming and, in perspective, to make such analysis feasible in the context of clinical tests. Some potential implications of the method for humanoid robotics are also discussed.