In this papec we propose a kind of “teaching by demonstration” method, aiming at its application to humanoid robots at home in the future. The demonstrator’s motion is captured by a pair of stereo cameras mounted on hisher head, locating very close to hisher eyes. By tracking the landmarks attached to the demonstrator’s hand and the working environment, one can estimate not only the demonstrato...

It is important to recall that humanoid robot technology derives from the technology of industrial robots. It is obvious that the developments of bipedal robots such as the integration of robot-upper limbs to complex anthropomorphic structures have benefited from progress in mechanical structures, sensors and actuators used in industrial robot-arms. A direct link is sometimes made between the t...

Robotic hands built for manipulation are often anthropomorphic but not anatomically accurate. We are constructing an anatomically-correct testbed (ACT) of the human hand to understand its mechanisms, function, and control. We have previously demonstrated that an accurate model of the extensor mechanism in the ACT Hand is crucial in realizing the human-like finger movements. Here, we present des...

Dexterity robotic hands can (Cummings, 1996) greatly enhance the functionality of humanoid robots, but the making of such hands with not only human-like appearance but also the capability of performing the natural movement of social robots is a challenging problem. The first challenge is to create the hand’s articulated structure and the second challenge is to actuate it to move like a human ha...

We present a combined system that enables a humanoid robot to sense humans using different modalities. The user is localized by means of a joint audio-visual person tracker. His face is identified using a novel local-appearance based approach which is robust against partial occlusion. In order to determine the user’s focus and object of interest respectively, we estimate headpose using a neural...

This paper discusses the teleoperation of a humanoid robot. We focus on the tasks of manipulating an object where the robot keepsbalance by utilizing the contact between the hand and the environment. To realize this teleoperation task easily, we consider several automous functions such as balance keeping, avoidance of joint angle limit, and visual recognition. Some functions are implimented by ...

As humans we perceive other humans as individually different based – amongst other things – on a consistent pattern of affect, cognition, and behavior. Here we propose a biologically and psychologically grounded cognitive architecture for the control of nonverbal behavior of a virtual humanoid character during dynamic interactions with human users. Key aspects of the internal states and overt b...

In this work, we implement the floating base prioritized whole-body compliant control framework described in Sentis et al. (IEEE Transactions on Robotics 26(3):483– 501, 2010) on a wheeled humanoid robot maneuvering in sloped terrains. We then test it for a variety of compliant whole-body behaviors including balance and kinesthetic mobility on irregular terrain, and Cartesian hand position trac...

This paper presents a design research conducted as a part of a larger project on intelligent humanoid robots. The primary goal of this study was to develop an initial understanding of how design on humanoid robots should be carried out. Humanoid robot design is different from conventional industrial design. A humanoid robot needs to have personality and character because it interacts emotionall...

Humanoid robots have complex kinematic chains whose modeling is error prone. If the robot model is not well calibrated, its hand pose cannot be determined precisely from the encoder readings, and this affects reaching and grasping accuracy. In our work, we propose a novel method to simultaneously i) estimate the pose of the robot hand, and ii) calibrate the robot kinematic model. This is achiev...