This study emphasizes the need for standardized measurement tools for human robot interaction (HRI). If we are to make progress in this field then we must be able to compare the results from different studies. A literature review has been performed on the measurements of five key concepts in HRI: anthropomorphism, animacy, likeability, perceived intelligence, and perceived safety. The results have been distilled into five consistent questionnaires using semantic differential scales. We report reliability and validity indicators based on several empirical studies that used these questionnaires. It is our hope that these questionnaires can be used by robot developers to monitor their progress. Psychologists are invited to further develop the questionnaires by adding new concepts, and to conduct further validations where it appears necessary.

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Measurement instruments for the anthropomorphism, animacy, likeability, perceived intelligence, and perceived safety of robots

A method for controlling a surgical device is provided. The method includes manipulating the surgical device to perform a procedure on a patient; determining whether a relationship between an anatomy of the patient and a position, an orientation, a velocity, and/or an acceleration of a surgical tool of the surgical device corresponds to a desired relationship between the anatomy and the position, the orientation, the velocity, and/or the acceleration of the surgical tool; and imposing a constraint on the surgical device if the relationship does not correspond to the desired relationship and/or a detection device is unable to detect a position of the anatomy and/or the position of the surgical tool.

Method and apparatus for controlling a haptic device

In crowd scenarios, reliable trajectory prediction of pedestrians requires insightful understanding of their social behaviors. These behaviors have been well investigated by plenty of studies, while it is hard to be fully expressed by hand-craft rules. Recent studies based on LSTM networks have shown great ability to learn social behaviors. However, many of these methods rely on previous neighboring hidden states but ignore the important current intention of the neighbors. In order to address this issue, we propose a data-driven state refinement module for LSTM network (SR-LSTM), which activates the utilization of the current intention of neighbors, and jointly and iteratively refines the current states of all participants in the crowd through a message passing mechanism. To effectively extract the social effect of neighbors, we further introduce a social-aware information selection mechanism consisting of an element-wise motion gate and a pedestrian-wise attention to select useful message from neighboring pedestrians. Experimental results on two public datasets, i.e. ETH and UCY, demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed SR-LSTM and we achieve state-of-the-art results.

SR-LSTM: State Refinement for LSTM Towards Pedestrian Trajectory Prediction

Although the off-road mobility characteristics of wheeled or tracked vehicles are generally recognized as being inferior to those of man and cursorial animals, the complexity of the joint-coordination control problem has thus far frustrated attempts to achieve improved vehicular terrain adaptability through the application of legged locomotion concepts. Nevertheless, the evident superiority of biological systems in this regard has motivated a number of theoretical studies over the past decade which have now reached a state of maturity sufficient to permit the construction of experimental computer-controlled adaptive walking machines. At least two such vehicles are known to have recently demonstrated legged locomotion over smooth hard-surfaced terrain. This paper is concerned with an extension of the present theory of limb coordination for such machines to the case in which the terrain includes regions not suitable for weight-bearing and which must consequently be avoided by the control computer in deciding when and where to successively place the feet of the vehicle. The paper includes a complete problem formalization, a heuristic algorithm for solution of the problem thus posed, and a preliminary evaluation of the proposed algorithm in terms of a computer simulation study.

Adaptive Locomition of a Multilegged Robot over Rough Terrain

This dissertation is concerned with three-dimensional (3D) sensing and 3D scan representation. Three-dimensional records are important tools in several disciplines; such as medical imaging, archaeology, and mobile robotics. This dissertation proposes the normal-distributions transform, NDT, as a general 3D surface representation with applications in scan registration, localisation, loop detection, and surface-structure analysis. After applying NDT, the surface is represented by a smooth function with analytic derivatives. This representation has several attractive properties. The smooth function representation makes it possible to use standard numerical optimisation methods, such as Newton’s method, for 3D registration. This dissertation extends the original two-dimensional NDT registration algorithm of Biber and Straser to 3D and introduces a number of improvements. The 3D-NDT scan-registration algorithm is compared to current de facto standard registration algorithms. 3D-NDT scan registration with the proposed extensions is shown to be more robust, more accurate, and faster than the popular ICP algorithm. An additional benefit is that 3D-NDT registration provides a confidence measure of the result with little additional effort. Furthermore, a kernel-based extension to 3D-NDT for registering coloured data is proposed. Approaches based on local visual features typically use only a small fraction of the available 3D points for registration. In contrast, Colour-NDT uses all of the available 3D data. The dissertation proposes to use a combination of local visual features and Colour-NDT for robust registration of coloured 3D scans. Also building on NDT, a novel approach using 3D laser scans to perform appearance-based loop detection for mobile robots is proposed. Loop detection is an importantproblem in the SLAM (simultaneous localisation and mapping) domain. The proposed approach uses only the appearance of 3D point clouds to detect loops and requires nopose information. It exploits the NDT surface representation to create histograms based on local surface orientation and smoothness. The surface-shape histograms compress the input data by two to three orders of magnitude. Because of the high compression rate, the histograms can be matched efficiently to compare the appearance of two scans. Rotation invariance is achieved by aligning scans with respect to dominant surface orientations. In order to automatically determine the threshold that separates scans at loop closures from nonoverlapping ones, the proposed approach uses expectation maximisation to fit a Gamma mixture model to the output similarity measures. In order to enable more high-level tasks, it is desirable to extract semantic information from 3D models. One important task where such 3D surface analysis is useful is boulder detection for mining vehicles. This dissertation presents a method, also inspired by NDT, that provides clues as to where the pile is, where the bucket should be placed for loading, and where there are obstacles. The points of 3D point clouds are classified based on the surrounding surface roughness and orientation. Other potential applications include extraction of drivable paths over uneven surfaces.

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The three-dimensional normal-distributions transform : an efficient representation for registration, surface analysis, and loop detection

A robotic assistance system is presented which enables a human to handle unwieldy long objects by providing only one point of support. The robot grasps one end of the object and helps the human operator carry it at the other end. The proposed control method uses a virtual nonholonomic constraint. The movement of the object is constrained as if it were being carried on a wheel attached to the object. This method prevents the object from slipping sideways and simplifies the carrying operation. In spite of the constraint, the object can reach any position and orientation due to the nonholonomy. Cooperative manipulation in a horizontal plane is considered first, and then it is extended to 6-DoF manipulation in 3-D space. Experimental results show that an operator can easily handle a long object when aided by the robot.

Human-Robot Cooperative Manipulation Using a Virtual Nonholonomic Constraint

A robotic assistance system for handling long objects that are difficult to manipulate with only one point of support is presented. The robot grasps one end of the object and helps the human operator to carry at the other end. Such cooperative manipulation in a horizontal plane is considered here. The control method proposed uses a virtual nonholonomic constraint. The movement of the object is constrained as if it were being carried on a wheel attached to the object. This method can prevent the object from slipping sideways and simplify the carrying operation. The experimental results show that an operator can easily handle a long object when aided by the robot.

Human-robot cooperative manipulation using a virtual nonholonomic constraint

The development of a chopstick-like two-fingered micromanipulator based on a hybrid mechanism is presented. The microhand consists of two 3-prismatic-revolute-spherical (PRS) parallel modules connected serially in a mirror image style. Each module has a long glass pipette as an end effector. The development process consists of three phases. In the first phase, analysis and mathematical modeling, a novel solution of the inverse kinematics problem (IKP) of a 3-revolute-prismatic-spherical (RPS) parallel module, is derived and applied with proper modification to the case of 3-PRS of the proposed mechanism. The solution is extended to the two-fingered hybrid mechanism of the microhand. In the optimization and design phase, the optimization of the chosen design parameters of a theoretical 3-PRS parallel module is carried out using two approaches: discretization method and genetic algorithms. Based on the optimal design parameters, a CAD model of the 3-PRS finger module is built, and a complementary optimization step using the ANSYS Workbench program is carried out to determine suitable characteristics of the pin flexure hinge. Finally, the total CAD model of the two-fingered hand is built. In the realization and implementation phase, the description of the hardware system of the two-fingered microhand prototype is presented. The program description, calibration method, practical Jacobian matrices, practical workspace, and error analysis of the prototype are discussed.

Developmental Process of a Chopstick-Like Hybrid-Structure Two-Fingered Micromanipulator Hand for 3-D Manipulation of Microscopic Objects

A method for control of a cooperative object-transporting robot, in which a man and a robot transport a long object or a large-sized object while grasping each of the ends of the object. An angle of a hand-tip of the robot is detected by angle sensors, and based on the sensor signals, a motion instruction for a translational motion of the hand-tip in the vertical direction is output so as to keep the posture of the object horizontal.

Method and system for controlling cooperative object-transporting robot

This paper discusses pushing a heavy object by a humanoid robot. We modify the whole body motion considering the hand reflecting forces for the walking pattern of a humanoid robot. By assuming that linear and angular momentum of a humanoid robot are calculated, we define the projection of the Center of the Mass(CoM) as” Dynamically Complemental Zero Moment Point(DCZMP)”, when external forces act to the end-effectors. We propose a new method using the DCZMP for the modification control of CoM position with balancing control. The robot can keep the dynamical balance considering the DCZMP and the walking velocity in both single and double support phase. In addition, for controlling pushing force, we implement an impedance controller with the manipulation and walking velocity controller. The effectiveness of the proposed method is confirmed by simulations and experiments.

Tomohito Takubo

Papers

Human-Robot Cooperative Manipulation Using a Virtual Nonholonomic Constraint

Human-robot cooperative manipulation using a virtual nonholonomic constraint

Developmental Process of a Chopstick-Like Hybrid-Structure Two-Fingered Micromanipulator Hand for 3-D Manipulation of Microscopic Objects

Method and system for controlling cooperative object-transporting robot

Pushing an Object Considering the Hand Reflect Forces by Humanoid Robot in Dynamic Walking