Humanoid Robots

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Humanoid Robots

• Debzani Deb

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History

• Hirokazu Kato, a professor at Waseda University
  in Tokyo built Wabot-1
• Could walk, grasp and talk.
• The Wabot-2 was built in 1984
• Could sit on a piano bench, read the music placed
  on the music stand above the keyboard with its
  head (a TV camera) and play the piece of music.
• By the mid 1990s many humanoid projects are under
  way most notably in Japan, Germany and U.S.

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Why Humanoid Research?

• To study walking gait of human beings.
• To build teleoperated robot to directly take
  place of human.
• To build robots that can perform everyday work.
• To investigate hand-eye coordination for tasks
  usually done by people.
• To entertain.
• To study how people do what they do in the world.

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Current Humanoid Research

• Humanoid research encompasses a very wide range
  of research areas.
• Due to the complexity still rather fragmented.
• The major areas are
• Locomotion and motor control bipedal walking
  control and control of systems with many degrees
  of freedom and many sensors.
• Artificial Intelligence Robot Intelligence,
  Human Computer Interaction.

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Locomotion

• A stable bipedal walking is difficult to achieve.
• The main approaches taken are
• Model-based
• ZMP based (used in Honda sony robots)
• Biologically inspired
• Learning
• Honda ASIMO
• 26 degree of freedom
• Walk independently, even climb stairs
• Sony QRIO
• Can dance, run even surf
• RoboSapien

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Human computer Interaction

• Human robots are more easily accepted.
• Look like humans.
• Interact like Human
• Speech generation
• Gesture generation
• Speech recognition
• Gesture recognition
• The main task is to make the robot able to
  perceive, make their own decisions, learn and
  interact with human.

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Kismet (MIT)

• MIT AI lab adopted behavior-based approach and
  developed Cog and Kismet to study how social cues
  can be elicited from people by robots.
• Kismet is an active vision head with a neck and
  facial features.
• It has four camera two in the steerable eyes and
  two wide angle ones embedded in the face.
• Also has active eyebrows, ears, lips and a jaw.
• Altogether it has 17 motors.

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Many moods of Kismet
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Kismet (cont.)

• Has capabilities saccades and smooth pursuit
  like human.
• Can detect human faces, estimate gaze direction
  of a person and understand what a person paying
  attention to.
• Express its internal emotional state through
  facial expression and prosody in its voice.
• Can able to detect basic prosody in the voices of
  people and classify their speech as praising,
  prohibiting, bidding for attention or
  soothing.
• Kismets perception and control systems runs on
  more than a dozen computers.

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Kismets vision
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References

• Rodney Brooks, Humanoid Robots, Communications of
  the ACM, Vol. 45, No. 3 (March 2002). Available
  at http//doi.acm.org/10.1145/504729.504751
• Humanoid Robotics Group, http//www.ai.mit.edu/pro
  jects/humanoid-robotics-group/.
• R. Brooks, C. Breazeal, M. Marjanovic, and B.
  Scassellati, The Cog project Building a
  humanoid robot, Lecture Notes in Computer
  Science, vol. 1562, pp. 5287, 1999.
• Robocup, http//www.robocup.org/
• Manuela Veloso, Entertainment Robotics,
  Communications of the ACM, Vol. 45, No. 3 (March
  2002). Available at http//doi.acm.org/10.1145/50
  4729.504755
• http//www.sony.net/SonyInfo/QRIO/top_nf.html
• http//asimo.honda.com/