This paper reports our approaches and efforts for developing communication robots for elementary schools. In particular, we describe the fundamental mechanism of the interactive humanoid robot, Robovie, for interacting with multiple persons, maintaining relationships, and estimating social relationships among children. The developed robot Robovie was applied for two field experiments at element...

Since 1996, we have embarked into the journey of developing humanoid robots at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. We have ventured into the various technical aspects of humanoid robot development. In particular, we have placed special emphasis on mechatronics design of humanoid robots, planning and control of biped walking, hand-eye coordination for humanoid robots, cognitive vision f...

Many people working in AI see the construction of an android with human-like abilities as the main goal of AI. For example, Charniak and McDermott write [4, p. 7]: The ultimate goal of AI research (which we are very far from achieving) is to build a person, or, more humbly, an animal. Those working on the MIT Cog Project are more explicit [3]: Building an android, an autonomous robot with human...

In this paper a case study of cooperation of a strongly heterogeneous autonomous robot team, composed of a highly articulated humanoid robot and a wheeled robot with largely complementing and some redundant abilities is presented. By combining strongly heterogeneous robots the diversity of achievable tasks increases as the variety of sensing and motion abilities of the robot system is extended ...

In this paper, we describe a new real-time visual system that enables a humanoid robot to learn from and interact with humans. The core of the visual system is a probabilistic tracker that uses shape and color information to find relevant objects in the scene. Multiscale representations, windowing and masking are employed to accelerate the data processing. The perception system is directly coup...

This paper describes the development of a novel humanoid robot ankle based on an orientation Parallel Kinematic Mechanism (PKM) for intelligent and flexible control. With three identical Universal-Prismatic-Spherical prismatic-actuated limbs and a central Universal-Revolute passive limb, the PKM can perform three degrees of freedom rotational motions. In order to enable the humanoid robot safel...

This document describes the hardware and software architecture behind the ELVIS robot. ELVIS is a bipedal robot with human-like geometry and motion capabilities | a humanoid. ELVIS is also the rst robot in a series of planned humanoid experiments, all of which will be primarily controlled by evolutionary adaptive methods. The nal goal of our research project is to build a human-sized robot base...

The interest in robot-assisted therapies (RAT) for dementia care has grown steadily in recent years. However, RAT using humanoid robots is still a novel practice for which the adhesion mechanisms, indications and benefits remain unclear. Also, little is known about how the robot's behavioral and affective style might promote engagement of persons with dementia (PwD) in RAT. The present study so...

This paper explores how a robot’s physical presence affects human judgments of the robot as a social partner. For this experiment, participants collaborated on simple book-moving tasks with a humanoid robot that was either physically present or displayed via a live video feed. Multiple tasks individually examined the following aspects of social interaction: greetings, cooperation, trust, and pe...

An autonomous mobile humanoid robot able to assist in a workshop environment and interact with human beings, must have the basic capability of learning manipulation tasks by demonstration. In this paper two aspects to reach this goal are considered. First we describe how the mechanics must be constructed to manipulate objects like humans do. Then we propose an approach to transfer human arm mov...