4,335 research outputs found
Overcoming barriers and increasing independence: service robots for elderly and disabled people
This paper discusses the potential for service robots to overcome barriers and increase independence of
elderly and disabled people. It includes a brief overview of the existing uses of service robots by disabled and elderly
people and advances in technology which will make new uses possible and provides suggestions for some of these new
applications. The paper also considers the design and other conditions to be met for user acceptance. It also discusses
the complementarity of assistive service robots and personal assistance and considers the types of applications and
users for which service robots are and are not suitable
Analyzing Whole-Body Pose Transitions in Multi-Contact Motions
When executing whole-body motions, humans are able to use a large variety of
support poses which not only utilize the feet, but also hands, knees and elbows
to enhance stability. While there are many works analyzing the transitions
involved in walking, very few works analyze human motion where more complex
supports occur.
In this work, we analyze complex support pose transitions in human motion
involving locomotion and manipulation tasks (loco-manipulation). We have
applied a method for the detection of human support contacts from motion
capture data to a large-scale dataset of loco-manipulation motions involving
multi-contact supports, providing a semantic representation of them. Our
results provide a statistical analysis of the used support poses, their
transitions and the time spent in each of them. In addition, our data partially
validates our taxonomy of whole-body support poses presented in our previous
work.
We believe that this work extends our understanding of human motion for
humanoids, with a long-term objective of developing methods for autonomous
multi-contact motion planning.Comment: 8 pages, IEEE-RAS International Conference on Humanoid Robots
(Humanoids) 201
Data-Driven Grasp Synthesis - A Survey
We review the work on data-driven grasp synthesis and the methodologies for
sampling and ranking candidate grasps. We divide the approaches into three
groups based on whether they synthesize grasps for known, familiar or unknown
objects. This structure allows us to identify common object representations and
perceptual processes that facilitate the employed data-driven grasp synthesis
technique. In the case of known objects, we concentrate on the approaches that
are based on object recognition and pose estimation. In the case of familiar
objects, the techniques use some form of a similarity matching to a set of
previously encountered objects. Finally for the approaches dealing with unknown
objects, the core part is the extraction of specific features that are
indicative of good grasps. Our survey provides an overview of the different
methodologies and discusses open problems in the area of robot grasping. We
also draw a parallel to the classical approaches that rely on analytic
formulations.Comment: 20 pages, 30 Figures, submitted to IEEE Transactions on Robotic
Real-Time Motion Planning of Legged Robots: A Model Predictive Control Approach
We introduce a real-time, constrained, nonlinear Model Predictive Control for
the motion planning of legged robots. The proposed approach uses a constrained
optimal control algorithm known as SLQ. We improve the efficiency of this
algorithm by introducing a multi-processing scheme for estimating value
function in its backward pass. This pass has been often calculated as a single
process. This parallel SLQ algorithm can optimize longer time horizons without
proportional increase in its computation time. Thus, our MPC algorithm can
generate optimized trajectories for the next few phases of the motion within
only a few milliseconds. This outperforms the state of the art by at least one
order of magnitude. The performance of the approach is validated on a quadruped
robot for generating dynamic gaits such as trotting.Comment: 8 page
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