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It contradicts the human's expectations when humanoid robots move awkwardly during manipulation tasks. The unnatural motion may be caused by awkward start or goal configurations or by probabilistic path planning processes that are often used. This paper shows that the choice of an arm's target configuration strongly effects planning time and how human-like a planned path appears. Human-like goal configurations...
This video presents our recent research on the integration of physical human-robot interaction (pHRI) into imitation learning. First, a marker control approach for real-time human motion imitation is shown. Secondly, physical coaching in addition to observational learning is applied for the incremental learning of motion primitives. Last, we extend imitation learning to learning pHRI which includes...
With android robots becoming increasingly sophisticated in their technical as well as artistic design, their non-verbal expressiveness is getting closer to that of real humans. Accordingly, this paper presents results of two online surveys designed to evaluate a female android's facial display of five basic emotions. We prepared both surveys in English, German, and Japanese language allowing us to...
This research is aimed at achieving human consciousness in a robot. The authors focus on mirror image cognition, which is a high-level conscious function of humans, and have been conducting mirror image cognition tests with the robot, and have discovered that emotion and feelings are closely related to decision-making and learning. However, do humans always decide on an action through their emotions?...
This paper presents our on-going work in developing service robots that provide assisted-care to the elderly in multi-party settings. In typical Japanese day-care facilities, multiple caregivers and visitors are co-present in the same room and any caregiver may provide assistance to any visitor. In order to effectively work in such settings, a robot should behave in a way that a person who needs assistance...
Assistive robots can be perceived in two main ways: tools or partners. In past research, assistive robots that offer physical assistance for the elderly are often designed in the context of a tool metaphor. This paper investigates the effect of two design considerations for assistive robots in a partner metaphor: conversation and robot-type. The former factor is concerned with whether robots should...
When a robot is said to be a specialist in a particular domain, does it alter the nature and quality of human-robot interaction? This study examines the effects of specialization in robot functions, along with individual difference in immersive tendencies, on users' trust, perception, activity, and memory. In a controlled experiment, 38 participants were taught a physical exercise lesson from either...
Behavior adaptation with execution experience is a practical feature for any policy learning system. Our work provides performance feedback to a robot learner in the form of tactile corrections from a human teacher, for the purpose of policy refinement as well as policy reuse. Multiple variants of our general approach have been validated on the iCub robot, as building blocks towards a high-DoF humanoid...
In this paper, we present the first steps towards a new concept of robot self-awareness that can be implemented into embodied robot systems. Our concept of “the self” is inspired by already existing approaches and aims to provide a cognitive system with meta-cognitive capabilities. We believe that robot self-awareness is a crucial factor in the improvement of HRI.
Since most robots are not easily displayable in real-life scenarios, only a few studies investigate users' behavior towards humanoids or androids in a natural environment. We present an observational field study and data on unscripted interactions between humans and the android robot “Geminoid HI-1”. First results show that almost half of the subjects mistook Geminoid HI-1 for a human. Even those...
The relationship between philosophy and computer engineering is considered, with particular emphasis upon the design of artificial moral agents. Top-down vs. bottom-up approaches to ethical behavior are discussed, followed by an overview of some of the ways in which traditional ethics has informed robotics. Two macro-trends are then identified, one involving the evolution of moral consciousness (conscience)...
In this paper, we show two practical demonstrations of the robot Nao in projects of Center for Intelligent Technologies. We present our research for tasks like object recognition; robotic kick the ball problem; voice commands recognition and human-robot interactions. At the end of the article we demonstrate that the robot Nao is suitable for these applications.
The above results suggest the following fact; only if persons feel higher anxiety toward communication capacity of robots, their anxiety toward discourse with robots increases when the robot looks the other way during interaction with them, and decreases when the robot fixes the face. It means an interaction effect between a specific type of robot behavior and anxiety toward communication capacity...
This paper describes the mechanism and the control system of a seahorse robot that is able to express happiness, sadness and anger. MP motion sensors (Pyroelectric Motion Detection Sensor), force sensors, and color sensors are employed to express emotion. The seahorse robot consists of a base, a body and a head. It has 4 DOFs (2 DOFs in the head and 2 DOFs in the body) and it weighs 800 [g]. Emotion...
Androids are potentially required to show human-like behavior, because their appearance resembles humans' physical features. Therefore, we propose a gaze motion planning method. Within this method, we control the convergence of eyes and the ratio of eye angle to head angle, which leads to a more precise estimation of gaze direction. We implemented our method on the android Actroid-SIT and conducted...
Robots appear to be engaging to many children with autism, and evidence suggests that engagement can facilitate social interaction not only between child and robot but also between child and another human. To date, no objective evidence has established a link between short-term child-robot interactions and long-term child-human interactions. We report on a therapy model that uses a robot in no more...
We are interested in “human-like” automatic motion generation. The apparent redundancy of the humanoid wrt its explicit tasks lead to the problem of choosing a plausible movement in the framework of redundant kinematics. Some results have been obtained in the human motion literature for reach motion that involves the position of the hands. We discuss these results and a motion generation scheme associated...
Bristol Elumotion Robot Torso Version 2 (BERT2) is a humanoid robot currently in development at Bristol Robotics Laboratory (BRL). In this paper we present the current state of development and demonstrate how the integration of several advanced subsystems (of commercial and non-commercial nature) within a heterogeneous computing infrastructure enables us to construct a unique platform ideally suited...
A humanoid robot can perform a task through a policy mapping from its sensed state to the appropriate task actions. We assume that a hand-coded controller can capture such a mapping only for the basic cases of the given task. As the complexity of the situation increases, the harder it becomes to refine the controller, and such refinements are often tedious and error prone. Based on the fact that a...
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