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The research on Music Playing-Instrument Humanoid Robots (MP-HRs) has a long tradition in the research field of robotics since the development of the humanoid pianist robot WABOT-2 developed at Waseda University (1984). Since then, several researchers have been aiming for the better understanding of the human musical performance. For this purpose, different mechanical designs and cognitive functions...
This paper deals with the problem of generating realistic human-like reaching movements from a small set of movement primitives. Two kinds of movement databases are used as reference. The first one is obtained numerically, by applying biological principles of motor control on the dynamic model of the robot arm. The second one is obtained by recording reaching movements of human subjects. From these...
A method for adding a target emotion to arbitrary body movements of a human form robot (HFR) is developed. The additional emotion is pleasure, anger, sadness or relaxation. This paper proposes a motion rendering system that modifies arbitrary basic movements of a certain real HFR to add the target emotion at intended strength. The system is developed on the assumption that movements can be emotive...
Shimon is a interactive robotic marimba player, developed as part of our ongoing research in Robotic Musicianship (RM). One of the potential benefits of RM is that it provides human players with embodied information that relates spatial movement to tone generation. This can aid in anticipation and coordination of synchronous playing. As part of a human-robot Jazz improvisation system, we present an...
This work presents the development of novel POSFET (Piezoelectric Oxide Semiconductor Field Effect Transistor) devices based tactile sensing system. The tactile sensing system, primarily developed for the robotic applications, consists of 5×5 POSFET touch sensing array and the associated read out and data acquisition system. The POSFET touch sensing devices are obtained by spin coating piezoelectric...
Lip synchronization is one of the most important technologies in the field of intelligent robotics. The natural and precise lip synchronization of robots could contribute to the improvement of human robot interaction and communication. In this paper, we designed a lip synchronization system for intelligent face robots using a text-to-speech system and robot mouth module. By applying several suggested...
We present a study on people's acceptance of robots performing tasks in a city. Three different entities (a human, a human in the costume of a mascot, and a robot) performed tasks in three different scenarios: endlessly guiding, responding to irrational complaints, and picking an accidentally discarded key out of a trash. All of these tasks involve entities interacting with visitors in situations...
This paper introduces the industrial design of the social robot `Flobi'. In total, three key concepts influenced the industrial design: First, the robot head of Flobi appears as a cartoon-like character and has a `hole-free' design without any visible conjunctions. Second, Flobi has dynamic features to display not only primary emotions, but also shame, a typical secondary emotion. Third, the structural...
We introduce a facial mimicry system, which combines facial expression analysis and synthesis on a robot, utilizing the facial action coding system. The activation of action units on a user's face is automatically extracted from a video stream and mapped to the robot, thus mirroring the facial expression. As a novel approach, a user study quantifies the congruence of the initial human facial expression...
Recent litterature suggested a top-down organization of locomotion, with the head being the stable frame of reference and the gaze anticipating the future direction. The present paper provides detailed investigation into the spatial and temporal relationship among the gaze and each body segment during locomotion on a complex trajectory without visual cues or guidance. We established that gaze direction...
The generation of communicative, speech-accompanying robot gesture is still largely unexplored. We present an approach to enable the humanoid robot ASIMO to flexibly produce speech and co-verbal gestures at run-time, while not being limited to a pre-defined repertoire of motor actions. Since much research has already been dedicated to this challenge within the domain of virtual conversational agents,...
It is believe that developing a robot without considering users feedback on appearance, functions and behavior will cause a share in the failure of research and evaluation of human robot interaction. This paper researched and solicited feedback from targeted users on their expectations and views of a robot, which will be used as a receptionist in a Singapore research centre. Based on design inputs...
Extended human-robot interactions possess unique aspects which are not exhibited in short-term interactions spanning a few minutes or extremely long-term spanning days. In order to comprehensively monitor such interactions, we need special recording mechanisms which ensure the interaction is captured at multiple spatio-temporal scales, viewpoints and modalities(audio, video, physio). To minimize cognitive...
We examined the effects of a robots' nonverbal response on evaluations of anthropomorphism and other dimensions (e.g., liking, closeness, pleasantness of human-robot interaction) in a case study. Our work both conceptually replicates and extends previous research: On the one hand, we replicated previous findings and generalized them to a different robot type, the iCat. On the other hand, our work...
Biped walking control and motion planning of humanoid robots have been researched for a long time and have made great progress. In order to serve people, the humanoid's arm should appear natural, have large working space and be easy to avoid obstacles In this paper a 7DOF manipulator with the same joint configuration as human's arm and its planning algorithm is proposed. The arm imitates the posture...
This paper describes an approach that a robot can use to learn to press doorbell buttons. This approach combines exploratory behaviors with an active learning strategy to enable the robot to learn faster how and where it should press a button in order to trigger the buzzer. The framework was tested with an upper-torso humanoid robot on seven different doorbell buttons. Three different active learning...
Demonstration learning is a powerful and practical technique to develop robot behaviors. Even so, development remains a challenge and possible demonstration limitations can degrade policy performance. This work presents an approach for policy improvement and adaptation through a tactile interface located on the body of a robot. We introduce the Tactile Policy Correction (TPC) algorithm, that employs...
Recently, the need of users is changing to the efficient quality of functions with the sophisticated design and reasonable price. Furthermore, current users prefer to the personal customization of products. Accordingly, a design support system is useful and helpful for non-expert people to design products easily, but such non-expert people might take much time and load in the product design. Therefore,...
As the world's elderly population significantly increases, researchers are searching for ways to slow and prevent age-related diseases such as dementia. Currently, a growing body of research supports the effectiveness of using non-pharmacological interventions to reduce the decline of or improve brain functioning in people suffering from dementia. However, implementing and sustaining such interventions...
This paper presents a passive dynamic walking model with segmented feet. The model extends the Simplest Walking Model with the addition of flat feet and torsional springs based compliance on ankle joints and toe joints, to achieve stable walking on a slope driven by gravity. The push-off phase includes foot rotations around toe joint and around toe tip, which shows a great resemblance to human normal...
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