Controlling a tendon-driven robot like the humanoid Ecce is a difficult task, even more so when its kinematics and its pose are not known precisely. In this paper, we present a visual motion capture system to allow both real-time measurements of robot joint angles and model estimation of its kinematics. Unlike other humanoid robots, Ecce (see Fig. 1A) is completely molded by hand and its joints...

Vision based control for robots has been an active area of research for more than 30 years and significant progresses in the theory and application have been reported (Hutchinson et al., 1996; Kragic & Christensen, 2002; Chaumette & Hutchinson, 2006). Vision is a very important non-contact measurement method for robots. Especially in the field of humanoid robots, where the robot works in an uns...

Recent progress in research on humanoid robots is making them to complicated tasks, such as manipulation, navigation in dynamic environments, or serving tasks. One of promising application areas for humanoid robots include the manipulation task thanks to their high potential ability of executing of a variety of tasks by fully exploiting their high mobility and adaptability coming from its large...

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...

Robots are gaining more attention in the neuroscientific community as means of verifying theoretical models of social skill development. In particular, humanoid robots which resemble dimensions of a child offer a controlled platform to simulate interactions between humans and infants. Such robots equipped with biologically inspired models of social and cognitive skill development might provide ...

Humanoid robots selectively emulate aspects of human form and behavior. Humanoids come in a variety of shapes and sizes, from complete human-size legged robots to isolated robotic heads with human-like sensing and expression. This chapter highlights significant humanoid platforms and achievements, and discusses some of the underlying goals behind this area of robotics. Humanoids tend to require...

In this paper, humanoid gait generation is formulated as a multi-objective optimization problem with multiconstraint based on probability distribution models. Under this framework, an estimation of distribution algorithm (EDA) based gait optimization approach has been developed to speed up searching in high dimensional coupling space constructed by the permutation of optimization parameters to ...

In this paper, we present that a humanoid active audition system improved noise cancellation using humanoid cover acoustics and the cover design for an industrial exterior design. From the viewpoint of a design, the cover of humanoid should be functional and beautiful. And, the humanoid exterior should not obstruct the motion of the humanoid. In other words, a humanoid with motion requires desi...