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Humanoids are increasingly used in the service sectors around the world to work with, or assist humans. However current humanoid designs place limitations on direct engagement with the human in terms of safety and usability. In this paper, we present an approach for the control of hybrid, high-speed and safe human-robot interaction systems with highly non-linear dynamic behavior. The proposed approach...
This paper addresses speaker recognition in a binaural context. Such an auditory sensor is naturally well suited to humanoid robotics as it only requires two microphones embedded in artificial ears. But the state of the art shows that, contrary to monaural and multi-microphone approaches, binaural systems are not so much studied in the specific task of automatic speaker recognition. Indeed, these...
Theremin is an electronic musical instrument considered to be the most difficult to play which requires the player's hands to have high precision and stability as any position change within proximity of the instrument's antennae can make a difference to the pitch or volume. In a different direction to previous developments of Theremin playing robots, we propose a Humanoid Thereminist System that goes...
To realize hyper dynamic manipulations such as jumping, authors propose the utilization of dynamically-coupled driving and joint stop mechanisms in a small commercial humanoid. To realize difficult dynamic actions such as vertical jumping by utilizing joint stop mechanisms, the motion planning for jumping has been performed based on a model with joint stop mechanisms into the legs. The modeling, motion...
We propose a visual recognition system for robotic applications in which distance to the visual objects can change a lot (for instance, trying to recognize a distant object learned from a short distance). Our system takes advantage of a single pan-tilt camera controllable in zoom and focus. Focus control allows to detect plans of sharpness in the scene and indirectly to compute a distance. Hence,...
When autonomous robots generate behavior in complex environments they must satisfy multiple different constraints such as moving toward a target, avoidance of obstacles, or alignment of the gripper with a particular orientation. It is often convenient to represent each type of constraint in a specific reference frame, so that the satisfaction of all constraints requires transformation into a shared...
Action representation is a key issue in imitation learning for humanoids. With the recent finding of mirror neurons there has been a growing interest in expressing actions as a combination meaningful subparts called primitives. Primitives could be thought of as an alphabet for the human actions. In this paper we observe that human actions and objects can be seen as being intertwined: we can interpret...
Many tendon-driven systems have been developed to realize more natural and various motions, or to lighten the end of a robot arm. However, the control based on the geometrical model, one of control methods the main of recent, is not easy for tendon-driven robots because more information is necessary, for instance muscle layout etc. This paper describes a muscle layout estimation methods for tendon-driven...
We consider the issue of segmenting an action in the learning phase into a logical set of smaller primitives in order to construct a generative model for imitation learning using a hierarchical approach. Our proposed framework, addressing the “how-to” question in imitation, is based on a one-shot imitation learning algorithm. It incorporates segmentation of a demonstrated template into a series of...
We developed an enhanced type of stiffness control module that we can embed in whole body of a musculo-skeletal humanoid robot. This module is a type of nonlinear spring unit. Using one pair units, we can change stiffness of wires, so we can control stiffness of a joint. This stiffness control method is a mechanical one that is superior in rapid response than an electric one using impedance control...
Face of a robot capable of facial expression has a complex structure inside consisting of many actuators, sensors, and other parts. Specially, eyes and its neighbor elements such as upper/lower eyelids, cameras and eyelids, are very densely arranged. In this paper, a compact eyeball module is suggested which is driven with Teflon tube enveloped metal wires, so that one directional motion can be made...
In this paper, we propose a method of visual recognition in cooperation with actions for automatic handling of clothing by a robot. Difficulty in visual recognition of clothing largely depends on the observed shape of the clothing. Therefore, strategy of actively making clothing into the shape easier to recognize should be effective. First, after clothing is observed by a trinocular stereo vision...
The human foot serves three main functions; adapts to contours of ground, absorbs shock impacts and stores and releases energy. Despite significant development of humanoid robots the foot has seen little research and as a result most bipeds do not walk in a humanlike manner. In this work a study of the human foot is conducted to determine how each of these is achieved. The paper then describes the...
This paper presents an asymmetric stiffness characteristic of a human hand. In human support robotics or medical robotics, the detail comprehension of physical human body is important to develop safe and high performed robots to work cooperatively with a human and to replace human dexterous tasks. It is known that a human arm generates variable stiffness depending on tasks by coactivation of agonist...
We present an approach for kinesthetic teaching of motion primitives for a humanoid robot. The proposed teaching method allows for iterative execution and motion refinement using a forgetting factor. During the iterative motion refinement, a confidence value specifies an area of allowed refinement around the nominal trajectory. A novel method for continuous generation of motions from a hidden Markov...
This paper presents a model-based method, called Dynamic Balance Force Control (DBFC), for determining full body joint torques based on desired COM motion and contact forces for compliant humanoid robots. The center of mass (COM) dynamics are affected directly through contact force control to achieve stable balance. This idea is used to formulate DBFC considering the full rigid-body dynamics of the...
Variable impedance actuators provide the ability to robustly alter interaction impedances mechanically, without bandwidth, power, and stability limitations. They can achieve the physical benefits of an elastic transmission and also recover characteristics of traditionally controlled, inelastic motors. We review previously explored benefits of variable impedance actuators for energetic tasks and impact...
Typical tasks of future service robots involve grasping and manipulating a large variety of objects differing in size and shape. Generating stable grasps on 3D objects is considered to be a hard problem, since many parameters such as hand kinematics, object geometry, material properties and forces have to be taken into account. This results in a high-dimensional space of possible grasps that cannot...
This paper develops full-state parametric controllers for standing balance of humanoid robots in response to impulsive and constant pushes. We also explore a hypothesis that postural feedback gains in standing balance should change with perturbation size. From an engineering point of view this is known as gain scheduling. We use an optimization approach to see if feedback gains should scale with the...
Imitation learning has been recognized as a promising technique to teach robots advanced skills. It is based on the idea that robots could learn new behaviors by observing and imitating the behaviors of other skilled actors. We propose an adaptive probabilistic graphical model which copes with three core issues of any imitative behavior: observation, representation and reproduction of skills. Our...
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