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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”.

• Kismet’s perception and control systems runs on more than a dozen computers.

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Kismet’s 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/projects/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. 52–87, 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/10.1145/504729.504755• http://www.sony.net/SonyInfo/QRIO/top_nf.html• http://asimo.honda.com/