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Intention recognition plays a key role in the cooperation among the humans. An intention describes an action or sequence of actions to be performed for achieving the intended purpose. The cooperating humans learn each others intentions while cooperation. In this paper we propose three ways how a robot can learn the intention of the cooperating human. In the first case, the robot learns the human intention...
In this paper, a method to derive the three predominant synergies and their temporal weights for planning grasps of the UB Hand IV (University of Bologna Hand, version IV) is proposed. The method adopted to define the postural synergies from experiments is based on the kinematic structure of the robotic hand and on the taxonomy of the grasps of common objects. The control strategy, exploiting postural...
The synthesis of multi-fingered grasps on nontrivial objects requires a realistic representation of the contact between the fingers of a robotic hand and an object. In this work, we use a patch contact model to approximate the contact between a rigid object and a deformable anthropomorphic finger. This contact model is utilized in the computation of Independent Contact Regions (ICRs) that have been...
Do individual differences in dispositional behavioral tendencies, such as immersive tendency and need to belong, play a significant role in human-robot interaction? To answer this question, the present study conducted a 2 × 2 between-subjects experiment to examine the effects of immersive tendency (high vs. low) and need to belong (high vs. low) on individuals' perceptions of a social robot. Preliminary...
Motor synergies have been investigated since the 1980s as a simplifying paradigm of motor control by the nervous system. In particular, it is believed that they allow control of the highly redundant kinematic chain of the human hand by the central nervous system. Whereas so far the focus has been on kinematic synergies, that is common patterns in the motion of the hand and fingers, we hereby also...
The need of solving the problem of multi-degrees-of-freedom in motor control is increasing as human-like robots become more popular these days. Muscle synergies hypothesis is a prominent suggestion for this problem. In this paper, we investigated the muscle synergies extracted from human subjects in a producing-force task to explore the mechanism of the human's skillful hand-movement at producing...
In order to further understand what physiological characteristics make a human hand irreplaceable for many dexterous tasks, it is necessary to develop artificial joints that are anatomically correct while sharing similar dynamic features. In this paper, we address the problem of designing a two degree of freedom metacarpophalangeal (MCP) joint of an index finger. The artificial MCP joint is composed...
In this paper we present a novel and simple handheld device for measuring in vivo human grasp impedance. The measurement method is based on a static identification method and intrinsic impedance is identified inbetween 25 ms. Using this device it is possbile to develop continuous grasp impedance measurement methods as it is an active research topic in physiology as well as in robotics, especially...
We propose a mechanism to communicate emotions to humans by using head, torso and arm movements of a humanoid robot, without exploiting its facial features. To this end, we build a library of pre-programmed robot movements and we ask people to attribute emotional scores to these initial movements. The answers are then used to fine-tune motion parameters with an active learning approach.
This article presents the results of a study on including human factors in assessment of the level of danger involved in a robot operation. A dynamic risk assessment method, which considers all effective factors in a collision, is essential for planning and control of the human-safe robots. In this regard, the visibility of the robot in the human eyes can significantly effect the probability of collision...
In this paper a reactive control strategy intended for human-robot interactions (HRI) is presented. A conventional reactive control scheme is reviewed first. This is followed by the introduction of a new prediction-based reactive control strategy. The new control strategy considers foreseeable dangerous events by predicting human motion using artificial neural networks, based on the previous pattern...
The fingertips and fingerpads are very important organs in human hand for handling minute objects, for example, picking up, carrying and rolling them. Therefore, imitating the advantages of these organs can lead robot hand to improving dexterity of the finger operations. In this paper, dexterity of pinching and rolling the minute objects is brought by explicit designing of the tip part of fingers...
This paper addresses the autonomous decentralized cooperation conveyance algorithm to improve the task efficiency by selecting a leader from other robots autonomously. This algorithm aims at coexistence of two exclusive features. One is the effectiveness that is a typical advantage of centralized control systems. The other is the adaptability and robustness to the environment which are advantages...
In this paper, a novel 3-D motion trajectory signature is introduced to serve as an effective description to the raw trajectory. More importantly, based on the trajectory signature, a probabilistic model-based cluster signature is further developed for modeling a motion class. The cluster signature is a mixture model-based motion description that is useful for motion class perception, recognition...
Robot skills are usually learned from the so-called learning-from-human-demonstration methods. However, with the limitation of robot motor capability, a robot may not be able to duplicate human motor skills with the same motor performance. To alleviate the problem, one of the possible solutions is to know robot motor capability in advance. Thus, we develop a quantitative measure of a robot motor system,...
This paper proposes a segmentation method of human manipulation task based on measurement of contact force imposed by a human hand on a grasped object. We define an index measure for segmenting a human manipulation task into primitives. The indices are calculated from the set of the contact forces measured at all the contact points during a manipulation task. Then, we apply the EM algorithm to the...
Human hands are capable of many dexterous grasping and manipulation tasks. To understand human levels of dexterity and to achieve it with robotic hands, we constructed an anatomically correct testbed (ACT) hand which allows for the investigation of the biomechanical features and neural control strategies of the human hand. This paper focuses on developing control strategies for the index finger motion...
The actual development of humanoid robots has recently led robot designers to take interest in human-like artificial hands to be used by anthropomorphic manipulators instead of the classic, but so weakly anthropomorphic, industrial robot gripper. Controlling a robot upper limb with an artificial hand is, according to us, a new challenge for robotics. We analyze how to derive a Denavit-Hartenberg table...
Some nonverbal information such as prosody are reported to be able to play a role of penalty signal in human-human and human-agent communication. In order to investigate whether other nonverbal information such as gesture can play similar role in human-robot interactive task, a pilot experiment using a directional guidance task was conducted. The results suggested that a part of ldquostoprdquo instructions...
The objective of this work is first to present a study and analysis of fundamental issues that constitute the development of a hand rehabilitation system by making use of mechanisms for objective and quantitative assessment for patients with motor weakness, such as spinal cord injury (SCI) and post-stroke. The proposed rehabilitation system aims to improve the functional ability of impaired hand on...
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