International Journal of Humanoid Robotics 

About: International Journal of Humanoid Robotics is an academic journal published by World Scientific. The journal publishes majorly in the area(s): Humanoid robot & Robot. It has an ISSN identifier of 0219-8436. Over the lifetime, 613 publications have been published receiving 12989 citations.

Zero-moment point — thirty five years of its life

Abstract: This paper is devoted to the permanence of the concept of Zero-Moment Point, widelyknown by the acronym ZMP. Thirty-five years have elapsed since its implicit presentation (actually before being named ZMP) to the scientific community and thirty-three years since it was explicitly introduced and clearly elaborated, initially in the leading journals published in English. Its first practical demonstration took place in Japan in 1984, at Waseda University, Laboratory of Ichiro Kato, in the first dynamically balanced robot WL-10RD of the robotic family WABOT. The paper gives an in-depth discussion of source results concerning ZMP, paying particular attention to some delicate issues that may lead to confusion if this method is applied in a mechanistic manner onto irregular cases of artificial gait, i.e. in the case of loss of dynamic balance of a humanoid robot. After a short survey of the history of the origin of ZMP a very detailed elaboration of ZMP notion is given, with a special review concerning “boundary cases” when the ZMP is close to the edge of the support polygon and “fictious cases” when the ZMP should be outside the support polygon. In addition, the difference between ZMP and the center of pressure is pointed out. Finally, some unresolved or insufficiently treated phenomena that may yield a significant improvement in robot performance are considered.

A quasi-passive leg exoskeleton for load-carrying augmentation

Abstract: A quasi-passive leg exoskeleton is presented for load-carrying augmentation during walking. The exoskeleton has no actuators, only ankle and hip springs and a knee variabledamper. Without a payload, the exoskeleton weighs 11.7 kg and requires only 2 Watts of electrical power during loaded walking. For a 36 kg payload, we demonstrate that the quasi-passive exoskeleton transfers on average 80% of the load to the ground during the single support phase of walking. By measuring the rate of oxygen consumption on a study participant walking at a self-selected speed, we find that the exoskeleton slightly increases the walking metabolic cost of transport (COT) as compared to a standard loaded backpack (10% increase). However, a similar exoskeleton without joint springs or damping control (zero-impedance exoskeleton) is found to increase COT by 23% compared to the loaded backpack, highlighting the benefits of passive and quasi-passive joint mechanisms in the design of efficient, low-mass leg exoskeletons.

Synthesis of whole-body behaviors through hierarchical control of behavioral primitives

Abstract: To synthesize whole-body behaviors interactively, multiple behavioral primitives need to be simultaneously controlled, including those that guarantee that the constraints imposed by the robot’s structure and the external environment are satisfled. Behavioral primitives are entities for the control of various movement criteria, e.g. primitives describing the behavior of the center of gravity, the behaviors of the hands, legs, and head, the body attitude and posture, the constrained body parts such as joint-limits and contacts, etc. By aggregating multiple primitives, we synthesize whole-body behaviors. For safety and for e‐cient control, we establish a control hierarchy among behavioral primitives, which is exploited to establish control priorities among the difierent control categories, i.e. constraints, operational tasks, and postures. Constraints should always be guaranteed, while operational tasks should be accomplished without violating the acting constraints, and the posture should control the residual movement redundancy. In this paper we will present a multi-level hierarchical control structure that allows the establishment of general priorities among behavioral primitives, and we will describe compliant control strategies for e‐cient control under contact interactions.

Human–robot collaboration: a survey

Abstract: As robots are gradually leaving highly structured factory environments and moving into human populated environments, they need to possess more complex cognitive abilities. They do not only have to operate efficiently and safely in natural, populated environments, but also be able to achieve higher levels of cooperation and communication with humans. Human–robot collaboration (HRC) is a research field with a wide range of applications, future scenarios, and potentially a high economic impact. HRC is an interdisciplinary research area comprising classical robotics, cognitive sciences, and psychology. This paper gives a survey of the state of the art of HRC. Established methods for intention estimation, action planning, joint action, and machine learning are presented together with existing guidelines to hardware design. This paper is meant to provide the reader with a good overview of technologies and methods for HRC.

Whole-body dynamic behavior and control of human-like robots

Abstract: With the increasing complexity of humanoid mechanisms and their desired capabilities, there is a pressing need for a generalized framework where a desired whole-body motion behavior can be easily specified and controlled. Our hypothesis is that human motion results from simultaneously performing multiple objectives in a hierarchical manner, and we have analogously developed a prioritized, multiple-task control framework. The operational space formulation10 provides dynamic models at the task level and structures for decoupled task and posture control.13 This formulation allows for posture objectives to be controlled without dynamically interfering with the operational task. Achieving higher performance of posture objectives requires precise models of their dynamic behaviors. In this paper we complete the picture of task descriptions and whole-body dynamic control by establishing models of the dynamic behavior of secondary task objectives within the posture space. Using these models, we present a whole-body control framework that decouples the interaction between the task and postural objectives and compensates for the dynamics in their respective spaces.