In this thesis, we present a sampling-based approach to generate whole-body motions for a humanoid robot. In particular, the planner developed is capable to generate valid whole-body motions for body repositioning as well as for grasping and manipulation of articulated objects, such as doors or drawers. Besides the generic constraints involved in motion planning, such as joint limits and collis...

From Motor Learning to Social Learning: A Study of Development on a Humanoid Robot In this thesis, we describe how a humanoid robot designed to match the kinematics of a one-year old infant can learn to reach to visual targets, point toward visual targets, and share attention with a human. These three skills span the domains of motor learning and social learning. Instead of developing each of t...

This paper provides a summary of our research towards developing a humanoid robot capable of performing interactive manipulation tasks in a domestic/office environment. Visual sensing makes important contributions to all areas of task specification, planning and actuation by enabling the robot to interact through gesture recognition, recognize and locate objects and obstacles, and employ visual...

The work presented in this paper is based on a novel integrated and compact hydraulic robotic actuator [1] (BIA patentUS20110085922), intended for the hydraulic humanoid robot HYDROïD. This actuator solves the problem of autonomy for hydraulic humanoid robots as it can be integrated to operate each joint separately. Thus, eliminating the need for a central hydraulic power pack. Also, due to its...

Previous work has shown that gestural behaviors affect anthropomorphic inferences about artificial communicators such as virtual agents. In an experiment with a humanoid robot, we investigated to what extent gesture would affect anthropomorphic inferences about the robot. Particularly, we examined the effects of the robot’s hand and arm gestures on the attribution of typically human traits, lik...

Our goal is to develop the low level control system for an artificial hand ”Blackfingers”. Blackfingers was thought to have two main applications: as humanoid robot’s hand or as a human hand prothesis. In this last application our intent is to realize a device more sophisticated respect the actual commerce prothesis. Also in our intention is to use some biological paradigms to create a human li...

The Humanoid Robotics Project of the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry of Japan realized that biped humanoid robots can perform manual labour. The project developed humanoid robot platforms, consisting of humanoid robot hardware and a package of fundamental software, and explored applications of humanoid robots on them. The applications include maintenance tasks of industrial plants, tele...

| this paper outlines the 2nd generation of multisensory hand design at DLR. The results of the use of DLR's Hand I were analyzed and enabled in addition to the big e orts made in grasping technology to design the next generation of dextrous robot hands. An open skeleton structure for better maintenance with semi shell housings and the new automatically recon gurable palm have been equipped wit...

Reinforcement learning offers the most general framework to take traditional robotics towards true autonomy and versatility. However, applying reinforcement learning to high dimensional movement systems like humanoid robots remains an unsolved problem. In this paper, we discuss different approaches of reinforcement learning in terms of their applicability in humanoid robotics. Methods can be co...