Despite rapid advancements in dexterity and mechanical design, the utility of humanoid robots outside of a controlled laboratory setting is limited in part due to the complexity involved in programming robots to grasp common objects. There exists a need for an efficient method to command high degree-of-freedom (DoF) position-controlled dexterous manipulators to grasp a range of objects such tha...

Humanoid robots could replace humans in hazardous situations but most of such are equally dangerous for them, which means that they have a high chance being damaged and falling. We hypothesize humanoid would be mostly used buildings, makes them likely to close wall. To avoid fall, can therefore lean on the closest wall, as human do, provided find few milliseconds where put hand(s). This letter ...

This paper presents a framework for parallel tracking of human hands and faces in real time, and is a partial solution to a larger project on human-robot interaction which aims at training autistic children using a humanoid robot in a realistic non-restricted environment. In addition to the framework, the results of tracking different hand waving patterns are shown. These patterns provide an ea...

In this paper, we propose a language grounding method that relates verbs which imply body manipulation to motor angle patterns in a humanoid robot to make robots more entertaining. In established methods, verbs are represented by statistical models based on trajectories or motor patterns of a trajector. In our method we use a novel representation model that has six features including both traje...

Hand gestures are important means of expressivity for humanoids. In this paper by humanoid we understand user-controlled or autonomous virtual humans (VHs) or conversational agents (ECAs) [4] as well as human-like robots [18]. We cover both cases of human-humanoid and humanoid-humanoid interaction. The semantics, the morphology, the variations in performance of gestures reflecting cultural, aff...

We propose a control system for humanoid robot reaching using a motor-motor mapping that is learnt online. The system combines endpoint closed-loop and open-loop visual servo control. The closed-loop component moves the eyes, head, arm, and torso, based on the position of the target and the robot’s hand, as seen by the robot’s head mounted cameras. The learned, open-loop component brings the ha...

This paper addresses a method of constructing a control system that realizes desired absolute hand position trajectory while walking. Controlling hand position in the absolute coordinate system with short delay while walking is a important function for realizing such motions as visual feedback reaching while walking, walking using handrail, and opening doors while walking. Based on previously d...

An open question in the area of social robot interaction is how to design test scenarios that on one hand provide the required complexity and on the other hand are still describable. The tabletop game Tangram has been selected as a test scenario for human-robot interaction. This paper describes how the required skills, to enable the humanoid robot ROMAN to play the game, have been ralized. Expe...

Robot learning in simulation is a promising alternative to the prohibitive sample cost of learning in the physical world. Unfortunately, policies learned in simulation often perform worse than hand-coded policies when applied on the physical robot. This paper proposes a new algorithm for learning in simulation – Grounded Action Transformation – and applies it to learning of humanoid bipedal loc...