Drum Beating and a Martial Art Bojutsu Performed by a Humanoid Robot

Over the past few decades a considerable number of studies have been made on impact dynamics. Zheng and Hemami discussed a mathematical model of a robot that collides with an environment (Zheng & Hemami, 1985). When a robot arm fixed on the ground collides with a hard environment, the transition from the free space to constrained space may bring instability in the control system. Therefore, the impact between robots and environments has been the subject of controversy. Asada and Ogawa analyzed the dynamics of a robot arm interacting with an environment using the inverse inertia matrices (Asada & Ogawa, 1987). In the early 90’s, the optimum approach velocity for force-controlled contact has been enthusiastically studied (Nagata et al., 1990, Kitagaki & Uchiyama, 1992). Volpe and Khosla proposed an impact control scheme for stable hard-on-hard contact of a robot arm with an environment (Volpe & Khosla, 1993). Mills and Lokhorst proposed a discontinuous control approach for the tasks that require robot arms to make a transition from non-contact motion to contact motion, and from contact motion to non-contact motion (Mills & Lokhorst, 1993). Walker proposed measures named the dynamic impact measure and the generalized impact measure to evaluate the effects of impact on robot arms (Walker, 1994). Mandal and Payandeh discussed a unified control strategy capable of achieving a stable contact against both hard and soft environment (Mandal & Payandeh, 1995). Tarn et al. proposed a sensor-referenced control method using positive acceleration feedback and switching control strategy for robot impact control (Tarn et al., 1996). Space robots does not have fixed bases, therefore, an impact with other free-floating objects may bring the space robots a catastrophe. In order to minimize the impulsive reaction force or attitude disturbance at the base of a space robot, strategies for colliding using reaction nullspace have been proposed (Yoshida & Nenchev, 1995, Nenchev & Yoshida, 1998). Most of the researches have been made to overcome the problems introduced by impacts between robots and environments. Some researchers have tried to use the advantages of impacts. When a robot applies a force statically on an environment, the magnitude of force is limited by the maximum torque of the actuators. In order to exert a large force on the environment beyond the limitation, applying impulsive force has been studied by a few researchers. Uchiyama performed a nail task by a 3-DOF robotic manipulator (Uchiyama, 1975). Takase et al. developed a two-arm robotic manipulator named Robot Carpenter, and performed sawing a wooden plate and nailing (Takase, 1990). Izumi and Hitaka proposed to use a flexible link manipulator for nailing task, because the flexible link has an advantage in absorbing an impact (Izumi & Kitaka, 1993).