I have developed "tennis elbow" from lugging this book around the past four weeks, but it is worth the pain, the effort, and the aspirin. It is also worth the (relatively speaking) bargain price. Including appendixes, this book contains 894 pages of text. The entire panorama of the neural sciences is surveyed and examined, and it is comprehensive in its scope, from genomes to social behaviors. The editors explicitly state that the book is designed as "an introductory text for students of biology, behavior, and medicine," but it is hard to imagine any audience, interested in any fragment of neuroscience at any level of sophistication, that would not enjoy this book. The editors have done a masterful job of weaving together the biologic, the behavioral, and the clinical sciences into a single tapestry in which everyone from the molecular biologist to the practicing psychiatrist can find and appreciate his or

Principles of Neural Science

https://users.dimi.uniud.it/~antonio.dangelo/Robotica/2012/helper/leggedRobot/Ijspeert08NN.pdf

2008 Special Issue: Central pattern generators for locomotion control in animals and robots: A review

Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) has recently received considerable attention in the academic community, in labs, in technology companies, and through the media. Because of this attention, it is desirable to present a survey of HRI to serve as a tutorial to people outside the field and to promote discussion of a unified vision of HRI within the field. The goal of this review is to present a unified treatment of HRI-related problems, to identify key themes, and discuss challenge problems that are likely to shape the field in the near future. Although the review follows a survey structure, the goal of presenting a coherent "story" of HRI means that there are necessarily some well-written, intriguing, and influential papers that are not referenced. Instead of trying to survey every paper, we describe the HRI story from multiple perspectives with an eye toward identifying themes that cross applications. The survey attempts to include papers that represent a fair cross section of the universities, government efforts, industry labs, and countries that contribute to HRI, and a cross section of the disciplines that contribute to the field, such as human, factors, robotics, cognitive psychology, and design.

/pdf/human-robot-interaction-a-survey-4q8yi606a9.pdf

Human-Robot Interaction: A Survey

Starting from human ?sense of touch,? this paper reviews the state of tactile sensing in robotics. The physiology, coding, and transferring tactile data and perceptual importance of the ?sense of touch? in humans are discussed. Following this, a number of design hints derived for robotic tactile sensing are presented. Various technologies and transduction methods used to improve the touch sense capability of robots are presented. Tactile sensing, focused to fingertips and hands until past decade or so, has now been extended to whole body, even though many issues remain open. Trend and methods to develop tactile sensing arrays for various body sites are presented. Finally, various system issues that keep tactile sensing away from widespread utility are discussed.

Tactile Sensing—From Humans to Humanoids

Also referred to as learning by imitation, tutelage, or apprenticeship learning, Programming by Demonstration (PbD) develops methods by which new skills can be transmitted to a robot. This book examines methods by which robots learn new skills through human guidance. Taking a practical perspective, it covers a broad range of applications, including service robots. The text addresses the challenges involved in investigating methods by which PbD is used to provide robots with a generic and adaptive model of control. Drawing on findings from robot control, human-robot interaction, applied machine learning, artificial intelligence, and developmental and cognitive psychology, the book contains a large set of didactic and illustrative examples. Practical and comprehensive machine learning source codes are available on the books companion website: http://www.programming-by-demonstration.org

Robot Programming by Demonstration

We present the design and realization of a conformable tactile sensor skin (patent pending). The skin is organized as a network of self-contained modules consisting of tiny pressure-sensitive elements which communicate through a serial bus. By adding or removing modules it is possible to adjust the area covered by the skin as well as the number (and density) of tactile elements. The skin is therefore highly modular and thus intrinsically scalable. Moreover, because the substrate on which the modules are mounted is sufficiently pliable to be folded and stiff enough to be cut, it is possible to freely distribute the individual tactile elements. A tactile skin composed of multiple modules can also be installed on curved surfaces. Due to their easy configurability we call our sensors "cut-and-paste tactile sensors." We describe a prototype implementation of the skin on a humanoid robot

/pdf/conformable-and-scalable-tactile-sensor-skin-for-curved-3svktlaquc.pdf

Conformable and scalable tactile sensor skin for curved surfaces

Jumping and landing movements are characterized by large instantaneous forces, short duration, and a high uncertainty concerning take off and landing points. Such characteristics make conventional types of control and robot design inadequate. Here we present an approach to realize motor control of jumping and landing which exploits the synergy between control and mechanical structure. Our experimental system is a pneumatically actuated bipedal robot called "Mowgli". Mowgli's artificial musculoskeletal system consists of six McKibben pneumatic muscle actuators including bi-articular muscle and two legs with hip, knee, and ankle joints. Mowgli can reach jump heights of more than 50% of its body height and can land softly. Our results show a proximo-distal sequence of joint extensions during jumping despite simultaneous motor activity. Extensions in the whole body motion are caused by the compliance and the natural dynamics of the legs. In addition to the experiments with the real robot, we also simulated two types of open loop controllers for vertical jumping with disturbance. We found that the model controlled by open loop motor command through a muscle-tendon mechanism could jump robustly. The simulation results demonstrate the contribution of the artificial musculoskeletal system as a physical feedback loop in explosive movements.

Mowgli: A Bipedal Jumping and Landing Robot with an Artificial Musculoskeletal System

CPG (central pattern generator) and entrainment dynamics together form a promising framework for robust and adaptive behavior generation for a high degree of freedom system in unstructured environment. This paper investigates its possibility in the domain of biped robotic locomotion. We extend a previous work on 2D biped locomotion using neural oscillators to 3D, introducing many more degrees of freedom and complexity in control. While the complexity of the problem has been increased, we have simplified the internal neural mechanism compared to the original 2D work. Our fully dynamic 3D simulation experiments showed that our mechanism can generate 3D stable biped stepping motion as well as tolerance against external perturbations.

Three dimensional bipedal stepping motion using neural oscillators-towards humanoid motion in the real world

For robots to possess high dexterity and interact intelligently with objects, a deformable tactile sensor skin which can also sense the deformation is of great importance. However conventional tactile sensors are not suitable for this purpose mostly due to the embedded wiring inside the sensing area. To overcome this problem, we have implemented EIT (electrical impedance tomography), a technique based on inverse problem theory, which can estimate the resistivity distribution within an electrical conductor by using only measurements from its boundary. By applying EIT to conductive materials such as pressure sensitive conductive rubbers, a deformable and deformation sensitive tactile distribution sensor can be realized. In this paper, some of the basic characteristics of the EIT based tactile sensor are reported. Also, we have demostrated how the conductive rubber sheets can be used with EIT to form a stretch distribution tactile sensor which detects sophisticated stimulations such as rubbing and pinching. In the end, we introduce our original conductive knit with high stretchability and low hysteresis, which can easily be implemented over complex 3D surfaces such as the face and also highly stretching areas such as the elbow joint.

A deformable and deformation sensitive tactile distribution sensor

Stretchable tactile distribution sensors are significantly important in realizing natural and rich tactile interactions for next generation humanoids with soft and smooth surfaces. We have developed such a sensor which has no wiring in most of the sensing area and is based on inverse problem technique - EIT. At first, we show the ability of the sensor to detect novel and rich tactile interactions involving skin deformation such as pinching and rubbing. Furthermore, by using our newly developed conductive knitted fabric, we demonstrate how the sensor can be extremely useful for sensing pressure distributions as well as for covering complex 3D surfaces such as the face. Also, we show a successful implementation of the highly stretchable sensor over movable joints, the repeatability of the sensor value against joint movements and the detectability of external tactile stimuli for various joint angles are also demonstrated.

Akihiko Nagakubo

Papers

Conformable and scalable tactile sensor skin for curved surfaces

Mowgli: A Bipedal Jumping and Landing Robot with an Artificial Musculoskeletal System

Three dimensional bipedal stepping motion using neural oscillators-towards humanoid motion in the real world

A deformable and deformation sensitive tactile distribution sensor

A highly stretchable tactile distribution sensor for smooth surfaced humanoids