The Infona portal uses cookies, i.e. strings of text saved by a browser on the user's device. The portal can access those files and use them to remember the user's data, such as their chosen settings (screen view, interface language, etc.), or their login data. By using the Infona portal the user accepts automatic saving and using this information for portal operation purposes. More information on the subject can be found in the Privacy Policy and Terms of Service. By closing this window the user confirms that they have read the information on cookie usage, and they accept the privacy policy and the way cookies are used by the portal. You can change the cookie settings in your browser.
Many applications such as management of wireless networks and the spread of mobile or biological viruses depend on modeling and predicting human mobility. However, widespread wireless localization technology, such as pervasive cell-tower/GPS location estimation, has only been available for the last few years, thus many factors that impact human mobility patterns remain under-researched. In this paper,...
Having a meal is one of the most basic human activities. There are several hundred thousand patients with upper limb disorders in Japan, who need to be nursed when eating. By letting the patients to perform meals with their own arms, it is expected to promote a more independent life and improvement in their quality of life. In our group we have researched and developed Robot Suit HAL, which is an...
Autonomous robots with limited computational capacity call for control approaches that generate meaningful, goal-directed behavior without using a large amount of resources. The attractor dynamics approach to movement generation is a framework that links sensor data to motor commands via coupled dynamical systems that have attractors at behaviorally desired states. The low computational demands leave...
We propose a novel method for acquiring robot skill synthesis that exploits human capability to learn and to control complex tools and devices. The basic idea is to consider the target robotic system as a complex tool akin a computer mouse or a car that can be intuitively controlled by a human. Once the human learns how to control the robotic system effortlessly, the target behaviour can be obtained...
One of the popular dynamics on complex networks is the epidemic spreading. An epidemic model describes how infections spread throughout a network. Among the compartmental models used to describe epidemics, the Susceptible-Infected-Susceptible (SIS) model has been widely used. In the SIS model, each node can be susceptible, become infected with a given infection rate, and become again susceptible with...
This paper describes an approach which allow a humanoid robot to automatically acquire vocalization capability by learning from a human tutor. The proposed algorithm can, at the same time, synthesize speech utterances from unrestricted text and generate facial movements of the humanoid head synchronized with the generated speech. The algorithm uses fuzzy articulatory rules, derived from the International...
Human sensory inputs and motor outputs mutually affect each other. This study focuses on the shear deformation of a finger pad during tracing movements. A tactile interface influences the sensory-motor relationships during the tracing movements by manipulating the deformation of the finger pad. We conducted a preliminary experiment involving five participants and confirmed that the moving distances...
An autonomous robot, which makes decisions based on previous experience and feedback from its sensors is one of the challenges in robotics. Among the most promising framework to bring traditional robotics towards true autonomy is reinforcement learning. However, reinforcement learning in high dimensional spaces usually required to encode robot tasks is extremely difficult. The key idea to speed up...
This work deals with the complex task of unscrewing and screwing a threaded cap with a dexterous anthropomorphic robotic hand. To that end, human motion profiles of nine test subjects were recorded using the CyberGlove II and the data were analyzed for unscrewing and screwing a bottle cap. Results showed that the periodic motions exhibited by the finger joints shared a common frequency for each subject,...
This paper introduces a novel face movement based human machine interface (HMI) that uses jaw clenching and eye closing movements to control an electric powered wheelchair (EPW). A multi-modality HMI derived from both facial EMG and face image information is developed and testified in comparison with a traditional joystick control in an indoor corridor environment. In the experiment, ten repetitive...
People tracking and following has become an increasing popular topic in recent years. The ability of robots to track the people in the surroundings is essential to many real life applications such as museum guidance, office or library assistance. Another aspect of human-robot interaction is the robot's ability to follow a human target. There are various scenarios where instructions, such as holding...
The video shows the complex task of unscrewing and screwing a threaded cap with a dexterous anthropomorphic robotic hand. To that end, human motion profiles of nine test subjects were recorded using the CyberGlove II and the data were analyzed for unscrewing and screwing a bottle cap. Results showed that the periodic motions exhibited by the finger joints shared a common frequency for each subject,...
In this paper we present a biologically-inspired model of spatio-temporal learning in the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex which can be used in tasks requiring the behavior of the robot to be constrained by sensory and temporal information. In this model chains of sensory events are learned and associated with motor actions. The temporality of these sequences is also learned and can be used to predict...
Even though humans and a humanoid robots have similar kinematic structures, directly imitating human movement does not guarantee the same behavior of the robot because of their different dynamical properties and perhaps different conditions under which the task is being performed. Our research starts by showing how to apply a generalization algorithm to extract the desired movement primitives from...
This paper presents a model and motion generation method for the task of collaborative pick and place between a robot and a human. It often happens that the performance of a human is higher than that of a robot, in the case where the robot needs to recognize the environment as well as human behavior and move in a safe manner. This fact requires that the robot needs to make motions considering the...
Video analysis aiming at efficient pedestrian detection is an important research area in computer vision and robotics. Although this is a well studied topic, successful detection still remains a challenge in outdoor, low resolution images. We present efficient detection metrics which consider the fact that human movement presents some characteristic patterns. Unlike many methods which perform an intra-blob...
In this paper, a color-based recognition approach is proposed to recognize and track the trajectory of moving object and use this approach for the examining of sports fitness to construct an automatic examining system. The quantity for the specific movements will be measured and counted by this system to substitute for traditional method to eliminate the error due to subjective evaluation. This automatic...
This paper describes the experimental analysis of eye movement during the generation of a trajectory by the human upper limb, carried out to elucidate the human mechanism for visual-information recognition. In the experiments preformed, subjects were asked to draw the trajectories of some kinds of images: a complete circle, semicircle, stippled circle. Reflective markers were attached to the subjects...
Recently, high-speed vision systems, which provide high frame rate visual information in real time, are widely used. Since the high-speed visual information is too fast for humans to recognize directly in real time, these systems are mainly used to control artificial systems such as robots. Contrary to this trend, we attempt to provide the high-speed visual information directly to humans so that they...
We apply a participatory co-creation process to empower health researchers/practitioners with robot assistants or mediators in behavioral therapies for children with autism. This process combines (a) a user centered design of a platform to support therapists to create and share behavioral training scenarios with robots and (b) acquisition of domain specific knowledge from the therapists in order to...
Set the date range to filter the displayed results. You can set a starting date, ending date or both. You can enter the dates manually or choose them from the calendar.