Human Friendly Programming of Humanoid Robots - The German Collaborative Research Center

Main goal of the German Collaborative Research Center (GCRC) is to build an anthropomorphic robot which is able to cooperate with humans. It addresses scientific problems in four different fields: humanoid mechatronics, multimodal interfaces, man-machinecooperation and machine-learning. Among those, natural, multimodal interaction is a key issue of humanoid robots since a human-like appearance suggests human-like properties and behavior. Although human communication in all its facets seems to be hardly reachable today, interaction via verbal inand output or via gestures is a big step to meet this requirement. Besides these channels, recognition of the interaction context is important because e.g. human references are often incomplete and sloppy. From human behavior, several context types like advising, commenting and teaching can be derived. In this article, we present a part of the framework used in the German Humanoid Robot Project (GHRP) that supplies multi modal interaction with robots in these contexts. Furthermore, an interactive teaching technique called ”programming by demonstration” is presented for native and intuitive transferring human skills and behavior to human-like robots. Since manipulation skills from humans are very well developed but not easy to describe with standard programming methods, it is expected to ease robot programming significantly.