Humanoid robot

About: Humanoid robot is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 14387 publications have been published within this topic receiving 243674 citations. The topic is also known as: 🤖.

The MuMMER project: Engaging human-robot interaction in real-world public spaces

Abstract: MuMMER (MultiModal Mall Entertainment Robot) is a four-year, EU-funded project with the overall goal of developing a humanoid robot (SoftBank Robotics’ Pepper robot being the primary robot platform) with the social intelligence to interact autonomously and naturally in the dynamic environments of a public shopping mall, providing an engaging and entertaining experience to the general public. Using co-design methods, we will work together with stakeholders including customers, retailers, and business managers to develop truly engaging robot behaviours. Crucially, our robot will exhibit behaviour that is socially appropriate and engaging by combining speech-based interaction with non-verbal communication and human-aware navigation. To support this behaviour, we will develop and integrate new methods from audiovisual scene processing, social-signal processing, high-level action selection, and human-aware robot navigation. Throughout the project, the robot will be regularly deployed in Ideapark, a large public shopping mall in Finland. This position paper describes the MuMMER project: its needs, the objectives, R&D challenges and our approach. It will serve as reference for the robotics community and stakeholders about this ambitious project, demonstrating how a co-design approach can address some of the barriers and help in building follow-up projects.

Haptic communication between humans and robots

Abstract: This paper introduces the haptic communication robots we developed and proposes a method for detecting human positions and postures based on haptic interaction between humanoid robots and humans We have developed two types of humanoid robots that have tactile sensors embedded in a soft skin that covers the robot’s entire body as tools for studying haptic communication Tactile sensation could be used to detect a communication partner’s position and posture even if the vision sensor did not observe the person In the proposed method, the robot obtains a map that statistically describes relationships between its tactile information and human positions/postures from the records of haptic interaction taken by tactile sensors and a motion capturing system during communication The robot can then estimate its communication partner’s position/posture based on the tactile sensor outputs and the map To verify the method’s performance, we implemented it in the haptic communication robot Results of experiments show that the robot can estimate a communication partner’s position/posture statistically

Development of a software for motion optimization of robots - Application to the kick motion of the HRP-2 robot

Abstract: This paper presents software that has been devised for the purpose of optimal motions computation for robots. For the time being, this study considered only open-loop and fully actuated structures. Generated motion satisfies a stability criterion while minimizing energy consumption. Motion optimization is solved with the IPOPT optimization package. In order to achieve fast and reliable optimization convergence, an efficient calculation of gradients is presented. Moreover, almost rarely considered in the literature, joint friction, which has a non- negligible effect on the optimized motion, is taken into account. Efficiency of the proposed software is demonstrated through the optimization of a kicking motion for the 30 degrees of freedom humanoid robot HRP-2.

Time-Optimal Path Parameterization for Redundantly Actuated Robots: A Numerical Integration Approach

Abstract: Time-optimal path parameterization (TOPP) under actuation bounds plays a fundamental role in many robotic theories and applications. This algorithm was first developed and perfected for classical serial robotic manipulators whose actuation is nonredundant. Yet, redundantly actuated systems, such as parallel manipulators or humanoid robots in multicontact tasks, are increasingly common in all fields of robotics. Here, we extend the classical algorithm of TOPP (a.k.a. numerical integration approach) to the case of redundantly actuated systems. As illustration, we present an application to multicontact trajectory planning for a humanoid robot.

An optimal planning of falling motions of a humanoid robot

Abstract: This paper studies an optimal planning of falling motions of a human-sized humanoid robot to reduce the damage of the robot. We developed a human-sized robot HRP-2FX which has a simplified humanoid robot shape with seven d.o.f. and can emulate motions in the sagittal plane of a humanoid robot. An optimal control is applied to generate the falling motion of HRP-2FX to minimize a performance index, and the optimality has been verified by the experiments on HRP-2FX.