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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...
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...
We show that inverse kinematics of different tools can be efficiently learned with a single recurrent neural network. Our model exploits all upper body degrees of freedom of the Honda's humanoid robot research platform. Both hands are controlled at the same time with parametrized tool geometry. We show that generalization both in space as well as across tools is possible from very few training data...
Secondary action, a concept borrowed from character animation, improves the animation realism by augmenting natural, passive motion to primary action. We use dynamic simulation to induce three techniques of secondary motion for robot hardware, which exploit actuation passivity to overcome hardware constraints and change the dynamic perception of the robot and its motion characteristics. Results of...
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,...
The purpose of this work is to investigate the applicability of a visual tracking model on humanoid robots in order to achieve a human-like predictive behavior. In humans, in case of moving targets the oculomotor system uses a combination of the smooth pursuit eye movement and saccadic movements, namely “catch up” saccades to fixate the object of interest. This work aims to validate the "catch...
The purpose of this research is to add the flying mobility to the humanoid robot to improve the efficient in climbing high obstacle and moving long distance. This paper proposed the concept of twin rotors configuration with CG shifting steering mechanism. The mathematical model was constructed. The numerical simulation showed the feasibility of proposed concept.
By using human speech information, different kinds of speaker and speech recognition systems have been developed for partner robots to efficiently cooperate with people in the daily life. For improving the recognition accuracy and robustness, a two-stage pattern matching algorithm for speaker recognition system of partner robots is proposed. In the first matching stage, by using fuzzy c-means and...
In this paper, we propose the concepts that apply quantum circuits to model Fuzzy Sets, thereby creating a new method to model behaviors for a humanoid robot. It is similar to the standard fuzzy sets from two points of view -1) of measured probabilities of state |1〉, and 2) that of the normalized measurement in a quantum ensemble computer. However, one can also look at the internal quantum states...
This paper describes the control of a three-fingered prosthetic dexterous hand developed by the State Key Robotics Laboratory at the Shenyang Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Science. A distributed control system is used to control the motion of this multi-finger hand. Preliminary experiment results show that the dexterity of the hand meets the design expectation and that the hand is able...
In this paper, we present a spiking neural network architecture that autonomously learns to control a 4 degree-of-freedom robotic arm after an initial period of motor babbling. Its aim is to provide the joint commands that will move the end-effector in a desired spatial direction, given the joint configuration of the arm. The spiking neurons have been simulated according to Izhikevich's model, which...
Spherical parallel manipulators can be used as wrists or hip joints of humanoid robots. This paper deals with the forward displacement analysis (FDA) of a 2-DOF RR-RR-RRR-RRR spherical parallel manipulator. The kinematic equations of the 2-DOF SPM are formulated at first. The singularity analysis of the 2-DOF SPM is then dealt with. After a closed-form solution to the FDA has been presented, a formula...
This paper presents the development of graphical user interface (GUI) for Humanoid Head Robot Amir-II. The GUI serves as a monitoring tool for the robot operation which includes the visual input from a webcam as its eye and the positioning of the Dynamixel AX-12 robot actuators. Matlab Graphical User Interface Development Environment (Matlab GUIDE) is used in developing the GUI which enables Matlab...
Noise generated due to the motion of a robot is not desired, because it deteriorates the quality and intelligibility of the sounds recorded by robot-embedded microphones. It must be reduced or cancelled to achieve automatic speech recognition with a high performance. In this work, we divide ego-motion noise problem into three subdomains of arm, leg and head motion noise, depending on their complexity...
A talking and singing robot which adaptively learns the vocalization skill by an auditory feedback learning is being developed. The fundamental frequency and the spectrum envelope determine the principal characteristics of a sound. The former is the characteristic of a source sound generated by a vibrating object, and the latter is operated by the work of the resonance effects. In vocalization, the...
This paper introduces a kinematically constrained closed loop inverse kinematics algorithm for motion control of robots or other articulated rigid body systems. The proposed strategy utilizes gradients of collision and joint limit potential functions to arrive at an appropriate weighting matrix to penalize and dampen motion approaching constraint surfaces. The method is particularly suitable for self...
Humanoid robots are appealing due to their inherent dexterity. However, these potential benefits may only be realized if the corresponding motion synthesis procedure is suitably flexible. This paper presents a flexible trajectory generation algorithm that utilizes a geometric representation of humanoid skills (e.g., walking) - in the form of skill manifolds. These manifolds are learnt from demonstration...
The planning of grasping motions is demanding due to the complexity of modern robot systems. In Programming by Demonstration, the observation of a human teacher allows to draw additional information about grasping strategies. Rosell showed, that the motion planning problem can be simplified by globally restricting the set of valid configurations to a learned subspace. In this work, the transformation...
This paper describes the control of a human-like robotic neck actuated with tendons. The controller regulates the length of the tendons to achieve a desired orientation of the neck and at the same time it maintains the tension of the tendons within certain limits. The solution we propose does not use any model of the system, but it relies on online learning of the different Jacobian mappings required...
This paper describes improvement of sound source separation for a simultaneous automatic speech recognition (ASR) system of a humanoid robot. A recognition error in the system is caused by a separation error and interferences of other sources. In separability, an original geometric source separation (GSS) is improved. Our GSS uses a measured robot's head related transfer function (HRTF) to estimate...
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