Humanoid robot kinematic calibration using industrial manipulator

© 2017 IEEE. Kinematic calibration is a crucial task for humanoid robot locomotion. The paper proposes a novel technique for joint offset calibration using industrial manipulator. Corresponding procedure uses position and orientation data from the manipulator and requires fixing of robots bases and end-effectors with respect to each other. The full pose information is obtaining as the humanoid limbs are moved through predefined configurations. To find joint offsets the least-squares optimization problem is solved. The proposed method is accurate since the industrial manipulator provides high precision. The proposed approach was validated on the calibration of AR601M humanoid robot using Kuka iiwa 14 industrial manipulator

Cognitive-developmental learning for a humanoid robot : a caregiver's gift

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2004.Includes bibliographical references (p. 319-341).(cont.) which are then applied to developmentally acquire new object representations. The humanoid robot therefore sees the world through the caregiver's eyes. Building an artificial humanoid robot's brain, even at an infant's cognitive level, has been a long quest which still lies only in the realm of our imagination. Our efforts towards such a dimly imaginable task are developed according to two alternate and complementary views: cognitive and developmental.The goal of this work is to build a cognitive system for the humanoid robot, Cog, that exploits human caregivers as catalysts to perceive and learn about actions, objects, scenes, people, and the robot itself. This thesis addresses a broad spectrum of machine learning problems across several categorization levels. Actions by embodied agents are used to automatically generate training data for the learning mechanisms, so that the robot develops categorization autonomously. Taking inspiration from the human brain, a framework of algorithms and methodologies was implemented to emulate different cognitive capabilities on the humanoid robot Cog. This framework is effectively applied to a collection of AI, computer vision, and signal processing problems. Cognitive capabilities of the humanoid robot are developmentally created, starting from infant-like abilities for detecting, segmenting, and recognizing percepts over multiple sensing modalities. Human caregivers provide a helping hand for communicating such information to the robot. This is done by actions that create meaningful events (by changing the world in which the robot is situated) thus inducing the "compliant perception" of objects from these human-robot interactions. Self-exploration of the world extends the robot's knowledge concerning object properties. This thesis argues for enculturating humanoid robots using infant development as a metaphor for building a humanoid robot's cognitive abilities. A human caregiver redesigns a humanoid's brain by teaching the humanoid robot as she would teach a child, using children's learning aids such as books, drawing boards, or other cognitive artifacts. Multi-modal object properties are learned using these tools and inserted into several recognition schemes,by Artur Miguel Do Amaral Arsenio.Ph.D

Climbing and Walking Robots

With the advancement of technology, new exciting approaches enable us to render mobile robotic systems more versatile, robust and cost-efficient. Some researchers combine climbing and walking techniques with a modular approach, a reconfigurable approach, or a swarm approach to realize novel prototypes as flexible mobile robotic platforms featuring all necessary locomotion capabilities. The purpose of this book is to provide an overview of the latest wide-range achievements in climbing and walking robotic technology to researchers, scientists, and engineers throughout the world. Different aspects including control simulation, locomotion realization, methodology, and system integration are presented from the scientific and from the technical point of view. This book consists of two main parts, one dealing with walking robots, the second with climbing robots. The content is also grouped by theoretical research and applicative realization. Every chapter offers a considerable amount of interesting and useful information

Visual servo control on a humanoid robot

Includes bibliographical referencesThis thesis deals with the control of a humanoid robot based on visual servoing. It seeks to confer a degree of autonomy to the robot in the achievement of tasks such as reaching a desired position, tracking or/and grasping an object. The autonomy of humanoid robots is considered as crucial for the success of the numerous services that this kind of robots can render with their ability to associate dexterity and mobility in structured, unstructured or even hazardous environments. To achieve this objective, a humanoid robot is fully modeled and the control of its locomotion, conditioned by postural balance and gait stability, is studied. The presented approach is formulated to account for all the joints of the biped robot. As a way to conform the reference commands from visual servoing to the discrete locomotion mode of the robot, this study exploits a reactive omnidirectional walking pattern generator and a visual task Jacobian redefined with respect to a floating base on the humanoid robot, instead of the stance foot. The redundancy problem stemming from the high number of degrees of freedom coupled with the omnidirectional mobility of the robot is handled within the task priority framework, allowing thus to achieve con- figuration dependent sub-objectives such as improving the reachability, the manipulability and avoiding joint limits. Beyond a kinematic formulation of visual servoing, this thesis explores a dynamic visual approach and proposes two new visual servoing laws. Lyapunov theory is used first to prove the stability and convergence of the visual closed loop, then to derive a robust adaptive controller for the combined robot-vision dynamics, yielding thus an ultimate uniform bounded solution. Finally, all proposed schemes are validated in simulation and experimentally on the humanoid robot NAO

Humanoid Robots

For many years, the human being has been trying, in all ways, to recreate the complex mechanisms that form the human body. Such task is extremely complicated and the results are not totally satisfactory. However, with increasing technological advances based on theoretical and experimental researches, man gets, in a way, to copy or to imitate some systems of the human body. These researches not only intended to create humanoid robots, great part of them constituting autonomous systems, but also, in some way, to offer a higher knowledge of the systems that form the human body, objectifying possible applications in the technology of rehabilitation of human beings, gathering in a whole studies related not only to Robotics, but also to Biomechanics, Biomimmetics, Cybernetics, among other areas. This book presents a series of researches inspired by this ideal, carried through by various researchers worldwide, looking for to analyze and to discuss diverse subjects related to humanoid robots. The presented contributions explore aspects about robotic hands, learning, language, vision and locomotion