Adaptation of Motion Capture Data of Human Arms to a Humanoid Robot Using Optimization

Interactions of a humanoid with a human are important, when the humanoid is requested to provide people with human-friendly services in unknown or uncertain environment. Such interactions may require more complicated and human-like behaviors from the humanoid. In this work the arm motions of a human are discussed as the early stage of human motion imitation by a humanoid. A motion capture system is used to obtain human-friendly arm motions as references. However the captured motions may not be applied directly to the humanoid, since the differences in geometric or dynamics aspects as length, mass, degrees of freedom, and kinematics and dynamics capabilities exist between the humanoid and the human. To overcome this difficulty a method to adapt captured motions to a humanoid is developed. The geometric difference in the arm length is resolved by scaling the arm length of the humanoid with a constant. Using the scaled geometry of the humanoid the imitation of actor’s arm motions is achieved by solving an inverse kinematics problem formulated using optimization. The errors between the captured trajectories of actor arms and the approximated trajectories of humanoid arms are minimized. Such dynamics capabilities of the joint motors as limits of joint position, velocity and acceleration are also imposed on the optimization problem. Two motions of one hand waiving and performing a statement in sign language are imitated by a humanoid through dynamics simulation.