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Previous research has shown that the humanoid NAO robot can enhance learning as well as improve communication in children with intellectual disabilities. However, most special needs schools cannot afford the humanoid NAO robot due to high costs. Could a cheaper non-humanoid Lego Mindstorm robot be an alternative way of achieving the same learning objectives as the humanoid NAO robot? A single case...
This paper describes the mechanism of a one-legged jumping robot that can mimic the muscular and skeletal system of a human leg. The jumping robot has a waist, a thigh, a shin, a foot, and a toe. The McKibben-type pneumatic muscle actuators that are able to generate the maximum output force of 1200 [N] are employed. Two kinds of pneumatic artificial muscles, mono-articular and bi-articular muscles,...
How exactly our brain works is still an open question, but one thing seems to be clear: biological neural systems are computationally powerful, robust and noisy. Using the Reservoir Computing paradigm based on Spiking Neural Networks, also known as Liquid State Machines, we present results from a novel approach where diverse and noisy parallel reservoirs, totalling 3,000 modelled neurons, work together...
Despite the rapid advances in technology relatively few are focused on special education, or the education for people with profound and multiple disabilities. One of the main causes for this to happen is that there is little incentive for companies to design and manufacture technology for a target group of customers without major buying power, or one that makes up a relatively small proportion of...
In this paper, an unsupervised adaptation algorithm for the microphone array topology of a humanoid robot is proposed, so that the spatial filtering performance is improved. In the given exemplary case, the target suppression (‘blocking’) performance of a geometrically-constrained BSS (GC-BSS) algorithm is shown to improve by the adaptation of the array topology. As a decisive feature, an online performance...
We propose a two-stage gait pattern generation scheme for the full-scale humanoid robots, that considers the dynamics of the system throughout the process. The fist stage is responsible for generating semi-dynamically consistent step position and step time information, while the second stage incorporated with multi-body dynamics system is responsible for generation of gait pattern that is feasible...
Gestures and postures are a non-verbal communication because it is translated through human's physical gestures and not through oral communication. This research focuses on creating a variety of human gestures and postures that are applied into a robotic form. The objective is to apply elements of human gestures and postures to robotic form and create an industrial ceramic art ware hence produce the...
The paper describes a mechanism of introspection of a humanoid robot based on self observation of its running processes and sensory data. The robot builds is internal state representation by a suitable ontology: a working knowledge of its physical structure and functionalities, that it can exploit to interact with humans in order to describe, in natural language, his state and the manner in which...
In Japan, increasing attention has been given to using humanoid robots to solve problems concerning personnel shortage and to reduce duty workload in clinical and nursing situations. Currently, the development of robots is not yet at the level where they can function like human medical and health care professionals. For this reason, it is imperative to discover ways in which humanoid robots can be...
Humanoid robotic hands are the essential end effectors for a robot to complete tasks in human environments. Their hands need to perform restraining power grasps and dexterous precision grasps fixed similarly to the positions of human hand postures. Advanced universal robotic hands have previously utilized actuator systems in the form of pulley-cables and pneumatics. These systems often require large...
In this paper a visual self-localization method for a humanoid robot is presented. This one is based on monocular information. The goal of this method is to obtain the position (x; y) and orientation θ of the humanoid robot inside the field of play. The methods proposed include some digital image processing algorithms and geometric interpretation to perform a 3D monocular reconstruction, that allows...
Most human interactions with the environment depend on our ability to navigate freely and to use our hands and arms to manipulate objects. Developing natural means of controlling these abilities in humanoid robots can significantly broaden the usability of such platforms. An ideal interface for humanoid robot teleoperation will be inexpensive, person-independent, require no wearable equipment, and...
This paper proposed a novel Coupling and Self-adaptive (COSA) grasping mode, aiming to overcome the disadvantages of the two main kinds of under-actuated fingers: coupled finger and self-adaptive finger. The COSA grasping mode includes 2 stages: coupling grasping and self-adaptive grasping. A 2-joint COSA finger (COSA-RB finger) was developed to demonstrate the new grasping function, based on a gear-rack...
We present a new method to calculate valid end-effector orientations for grasping tasks. A fast and accurate three-layered hierarchical supervised machine learning framework is developed. The algorithm is trained with a human-in-the-loop in a learn-by-demonstration procedure where the robot is shown a set of valid end-effector rotations. Learning is then achieved through a multi-class support vector...
The development of a humanoid robot within the scope of the collaborative research centre 588 - “Humanoid Robots - Learning and Cooperating Multimodal Robots” - has the objective of creating a machine that can closely cooperate and interact with humans. For designer this development area presents new challenges in mechanic design. Compared to industrial robots - for which high velocities, mechanical...
In this paper, we present a method for representing and re-targeting manipulations for object adjustment before final grasping. Such pre-grasp manipulation actions bring objects into better configurations for grasping through e.g. object rotation or object sliding. For this purpose, we propose a scaling-invariant and rotation-invariant representation of the hand poses, which is then automatically...
This paper describes a large-scale experimental study, in which a humanoid robot learned to press and detect doorbell buttons autonomously. The models for action selection and visual detection were grounded in the robot's sensorimotor experience and learned without human intervention. Experiments were performed with seven doorbell buttons, which provided auditory feedback when pressed. The robot learned...
Table tennis is a sufficiently complex motor task for studying complete skill learning systems. It consists of several elementary motions and requires fast movements, accurate control, and online adaptation. To represent the elementary movements needed for robot table tennis, we rely on dynamic systems motor primitives (DMP). While such DMPs have been successfully used for learning a variety of simple...
We present a multi-contact motion planning method that generates dynamic joint trajectories for multi-body robots that satisfy a set of continuous constraints. We highlight two variants when it comes to generate a single-contact or a multi-contact motion: the presence of the continuous equality geometrical constraints and of the contact forces. In this work, we compute the free-flyer trajectory and...
Several real world applications of humanoids in general will require continuous service over a long time period. A humanoid robot operating in different environments over a long period of time means that A) there will be a lot of variation in the speech it has to ground semantically and B) it has to know when a conversation is of interest in order to respond. Detailed natural speech understanding...
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