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This paper concerns modelling human hand or tool trajectories when interacting with everyday objects. In these interactions symmetries may be exhibited in portions of the trajectories which can be used to identify task space redundancy. This paper presents a formal description of a set of these symmetries, which we term affordance symmetries, and a method to identify them in multiple demonstration...
Robotics has been supplemented by the growing body of techniques associated with formal languages. One remaining challenge for bottom-up formal methods is to provide effective abstractions to their top-down counterparts in order to achieve a seamless integration. This paper describes our efforts to tackle this challenge in the domain of spatial behavior. Our general goal is to understand principles...
In Programming by Demonstration (PbD), one of the key problems for autonomous learning is to automatically extract the relevant features of a manipulation task, which has a significant impact on the generalization capabilities. In this paper, task features are encoded as constraints of a learned planning model. In order to extract the relevant constraints, the human teacher demonstrates a set of tests,...
Unwanted conflicts are inevitable between collaborating agents that share spaces and resources. Motivated by the use of nonverbal communications as a conflict resolution mechanism by humans, this study investigates the communicative capabilities reflected in the trajectory characteristics of hesitation gestures during human-robot collaboration. Hesitation gestures and non-hesitation human arm motions...
A current trend in robotics is to define robot tasks using a combination of superimposed motion patterns. For maximum versatility of such motion patterns, they should be easily and efficiently adaptable for situations beyond those for which the motion was originally designed. In this work, we show how a challenging minigolf-like task can be efficiently learned by the robot using a basic hitting motion...
Intelligent robot assistants will be simpler for laypersons to use if the robots are able to cooperate with their users anthromimetically. However, designing an anthromimetic robot controller requires knowledge of human behavior in the domain of interest. Previous works have identified cooperative carrying as an ideal task for robotic assistants, but studies of human behavior in this domain are few...
We present a decentralized system for the bilateral teleoperation of groups of UAVs which only relies on relative bearing measurements, i.e., without the need of distance information or global localization. The properties of a 3D bearing-formation are analyzed, and a minimal set of bearings needed for its definition is provided. We also design a novel decentralized formation control almost globally...
This paper presents a new approach based on temporal minimization for separation and extraction of high/low-energy variants embedded in human motion. A data set of over 6500 frames is used for training the proposed algorithm. Spatiotemporal cubic splines are employed for approximating the trajectories associated with walking sequences. The optimal numbers of control points required for synthesizing...
We propose a framework for the sensor-based estimation of manipulation-relevant object properties and the abstraction of known actions in a learning setup from the observation of humans. The descriptors consists of an object-centric representation of manipulation constraints and a scene-specific action graph. The graph spans between the typical places, where objects are placed. This framework allows...
Although the problem of dynamic locomotion in very rough terrain is critical to the advancement of various areas in robotics and health devices, little progress has been made on generalizing gait behavior with arbitrary paths. Here, we report that perturbation theory, a set of approximation schemes that has roots in celestial mechanics and nonlinear dynamical systems, can be adapted to predict the...
With the growing demand of personal assistance to mobility and mobile service robotics, robot navigation systems must be “aware” of the social conventions followed by people. They must respect proximity constraints but also respect people interacting. For example, they may not break interaction between people talking, unless the occupants want to take part in the conversation. In this case, they must...
This study investigated whether normal adults were able to discriminate agency from the perceived traces or trajectories of past actions such as handwritings. Subjects wrote two types of component parts of Chinese characters, either mastered and unmastered, and were later shown various handwritten strokes and judged whether each of them had been written by themselves or by someone else. We found that...
A model of a walking pattern imitating human motion is presented. An accurate imitation of human motion and a robust bipedal walking motion are, however, hardly realized together. We therefore focus on only three characteristics of human walking motion: single toe support, knee stretching, and swing leg motion. Based on a conventional pattern generator, single toe support is added, waist height is...
Traditionally the leader or follower role of the robot in a human-robot collaborative task has to be predetermined. However, humans performing collaborative tasks can switch between or share the leader-follower roles effortlessly even in the absence of audio-visual cues. This is because humans are capable of developing a mutual understanding while performing the collaborative task. This paper proposes...
This paper introduces and analyzes an algorithm for adaptation of the reference trajectory of a human or robot arm interacting with a novel environment. The algorithm, based on the minimization of interaction force and performance error by satisfying a desired impedance, yields a mathematically rigorous model of the underlying mechanism of motion planning adaptation in humans. Simulations demonstrate...
In aging societies, there is a strong demand for robotics to tackle problems resulting from the aging population. We have developed a prototype nursing-care assistant robot, RIBA, which was designed to come in direct contact with patients and conduct physically challenging tasks. RIBA interacts with its object, typically a human, through multiple and distributed contact regions on its arms and body...
Removing the safety fences that separate humans and robots, to allow for an effective human-robot interaction, requires innovative safety control systems. An advanced functionality of a safety controller might be to detect the presence of humans entering the robotic cell and to estimate their intention, in order to enforce an effective safety reaction. This paper proposes advanced algorithms for cognitive...
In this paper, we study two dancers' coupled body dynamics when dancing a waltz. A linear inverted pendulum (LIPM) model for biped locomotion is utilized as each dancer's dynamic model, and a balance controller for each dynamic model is introduced. A pair of dancers are then modeled as two spring-damper-connected LIPMs with their respective controllers. Assuming a perfect rhythmic and synchronized...
In this paper, we propose a cost function approach for multi-human tracking. We first build short reliable trajectories based on human appearance and position. Here, we apply topic model to represent human appearance. The appearance of each person can be considered as topic distribution. Then, we compute the cost function for each pair of reliable trajectories in the time sliding window to estimate...
We address the discovery of typical activities in video stream contents and its exploitation for estimating the abnormality levels of these streams. Such estimates can be used to select the most interesting cameras to show to a human operator. Our contributions come from the following facets: i) the method is fully unsupervised and learns the activities from long term data; ii) the method is scalable...
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