In this paper a very lightweight artificial hand is presented that approximates the manipulation abilities of a human hand very well. A large variety of different objects can be grasped reliably and the movements of the hand appear to be very natural. This five finger hand has 13 independent degrees of freedom driven by a new type of powerfull small size flexible fluidic actuator. The actuators...

The goal of this work is to build a cognitive system for the humanoid robot, Cog, that exploits human caregivers as catalysts to perceive and learn about actions, objects, scenes, people, and the robot itself. This thesis addresses a broad spectrum of machine learning problems across several categorization levels. Actions by embodied agents are used to automatically generate training data for t...

Humans possess a complex physical structure and can perform difficult movement tasks. Over the past few decades, many researchers around the world have concentrated on achieving human-like artificial mobility or dexterity either on humanoid robots or during the implementation of robotic assistive devices. In particular, humanoid-type robots mainly focused on hands to understand the mechanical a...

in this paper we introduce an improvement in the path planning algorithm for the humanoid soccer playing robot which uses ferguson splines and pso (particle swarm optimization). the objective of the algorithm is to find a path through other playing robots to the ball, which should be as short as possible and also safe enough. ferguson splines create preliminary paths using random generated para...

Pointing at something refers to orienting the hand, the arm, the head or the body in the direction of an object or an event. This skill constitutes a basic communicative ability for cognitive agents like, e.g. humanoid robots. The goal of this study is to show that approximate and, in particular, precise pointing can be learned as a direct mapping from the object’s pixel coordinates in the visu...

Grasping and manipulation by hands can be considered as one of inevitable functions to achieve the performances desired in humanoid operations. When a humanoid robot manipulates an object by his hands, each finger should be well-controlled to accomplish a precise manipulation of the object grasped. So, the trajectory of each joint required for a precise finger motion is fundamentally necessary ...

In recent years numerous robot systems with multifingered grippers or hands have been developed all around the world. Many different approaches have been taken, anthropomorphic and non-anthropomorphic ones. Not only the mechanical structure of such systems was investigated, but also the necessary control system. With the human hand as an exemplar, such robot systems use their hands to grasp div...

This paper introduces an open architecture humanoid robotics platform (OpenHRP for short) on which various building blocks of humanoid robotics can be investigated. OpenHRP is a virtual humanoid robot platform with a compatible humanoid robot, and consists of a simulator of humanoid robots and motion control library for them which can also be applied to a compatible humanoid robot as it is. Ope...

In this paper, a hierarchical control architecture incorporating a novel dual-arm impedance controller is proposed and experimentally evaluated in a valve turning setup. Proposed control architecture incorporates various control/interface modules to render a desired interaction performance in our intrinsically compliant humanoid robot, COMAN: the sensing module provides the manipulation module ...