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Resolved acceleration control is a well-known strategy used in tracking control of robotic systems where the desired motion is specified in task-space. Typically, such controllers are developed for systems which exhibit redundancy with respect to execution of operational tasks. While redundancy fundamentally adds new capabilities (self-motion and subtask performance capability), the degree to which...
This paper describes a speedup and performance improvement of multi-channel semi-blind ICA (MCSB-ICA) with parallel and resampling-based block-wise processing. MCSB-ICA is an integrated method of sound source separation that accomplishes blind source separation, blind dereverberation, and echo cancellation. This method enables robots to separate user's speech signals from observed signals including...
In this paper we describe the design of a Cartesian Controller for a generic robot manipulator. We address some of the challenges that are typically encountered in the field of humanoid robotics. The solution we propose deals with a large number of degrees of freedom, produce smooth, human-like motion and is able to compute the trajectory on-line. In this paper we support the idea that to produce...
This paper addresses sound source separation and speech recognition for moving sound sources. Real-world applications such as robots should cope with both moving and stationary sound sources. However, most studies assume only stationary sound sources. We introduce three key techniques to cope with moving sources, that is, Adaptive Step-size control (AS), Optima Controlled Recursive Average (OCRA),...
This paper addresses the problem of compactly encoding a continuous family of trajectories corresponding to a robotic skill, and using this representation for the purpose of constrained trajectory generation in an environment with many (possibly dynamic) obstacles. With a skill manifold that is learnt from data, we show that constraints can be naturally handled within an iterative process of minimizing...
A goal of our research is to produce a light-weight, low-cost five fingered robotic hand that has similar degrees of freedom as a human hand. The joints in the fingers of the developed robotic hand are powered by a newly proposed strings transmission named “Twist Drive”. The transmission converts torque into a pulling force by using a pair of strings that twist on each other. The basic characteristics...
In real-world situations, a robot may often encounter “under-determined” situation, where there are more sound sources than microphones. This paper presents a speech separation method using a new constraint on the harmonic structure for a simultaneous speech-recognition system in under-determined conditions. The requirements for a speech separation method in a simultaneous speech-recognition system...
Reinforcement learning in the high-dimensional, continuous spaces typical in robotics, remains a challenging problem. To overcome this challenge, a popular approach has been to use demonstrations to find an appropriate initialisation of the policy in an attempt to reduce the number of iterations needed to find a solution. Here, we present an alternative way to incorporate prior knowledge from demonstrations...
In this paper, we propose a method to achieve temporal scaling of leg motions as a fundamental technique for a music feedback system of a dancing humanoid robot. We asked dancers to perform dance motion at normal musical tempo and faster musical tempos and observed how dancers modified performance for given musical tempos. The obtained insights from the observation are 1) a dancer needs to preserve...
Utterance interval detection is a bottleneck for the current speech recognition performance in robots embedded in real noisy environments. In the present work, we make use of sound localization technology using a microphone array, not only for localizing, but also for detecting sound intervals of multiple sound sources. In our previous work we have implemented and evaluated sound localization in the...
The BERT2 social robot, a platform for the exploration of human-robot interaction, is currently being built at the Bristol Robotics Laboratory. This paper describes work on the robot's face, a hybrid face composed of a plastic faceplate and an LCD display, and our implementation of facial expressions on this versatile platform. We report the implementation of two representations of affect space, each...
This paper presents a method for mapping captured human motion with stepping to a humanoid model, considering the current state and the controller behavior. The mapping algorithm modifies the joint angle, trunk and center of mass (COM) trajectories so that the motion can be tracked and desired contact states can be achieved. The mapping is performed in two steps. The first step modifies the joint...
Many everyday tasks performed by people, such as reaching, pointing or drawing, resolve redundant degrees of freedom in the arm in a similar way. In this paper we present a novel method for learning the strategy used to resolve redundancy by exploiting the variability in multiple observations of different tasks. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this method on three simulated plants: a toy example,...
The high power ability of humanoid is desired for application of nursing or running or jumping motions. Achievement of the actuator of light and powerful equivalent to humans is required. In this paper, we propose a method to extract inherent performance from motors by an active temperature control. The method safely improves the output of motors. The active temperature control is achieved by combining...
We describe integration of preprocessing and automatic speech recognition based on Missing-Feature-Theory (MFT) to recognize a highly interfered speech signal, such as the signal in a narrow angle between a desired and interfered speakers. As a speech signal separated from a mixture of speech signals includes the leakage from other speech signals, recognition performance of the separated speech degrades...
Online optimal planning of robotic arm movement is addressed. Optimality is inspired by computational models, where a “cost function” is used to describe limb motions according to different criteria. A method is proposed to implement optimal planning in Cartesian space, minimizing some cost function, by means of numerical approximation to a generalized nonlinear model predictive control problem. The...
We present a system for real-time fundamental frequency, i. e. pitch, extraction on a humanoid robot. The system extracts pitch using an 8 channel microphone array mounted on the Honda humanoid robot in a realistic Human-Robot interaction scenario. The main building blocks of the system are a multi-channel signal enhancement followed by robust pitch extraction and tracking. The signal enhancement...
In order to exert large force on an environment, it is effective to apply impulsive force. We describe the motions that perform tasks by applying impulsive force as “impact motion.” The objective of an impact motion is to exert large force on an environment, however if the impulsive force is too large, the robot may fall down due to the reaction force. This paper presents an optimization scheme to...
In this paper we present an approach to transfer human-like reflex behavior to robots by utilizing leaky integrate-and-fire neurons. For the acceptance of robots in general and humanoid robots, which are even closer to people's daily life, in particular a main aspect is their appearance and how they act and move in human centered environments. Especially safety strategies are crucial for a widespread...
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...
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