Analysis and synthesis of bipedal humanoid movement : a physical simulation approach

textAdvances in graphics and robotics have increased the importance of tools for synthesizing humanoid movements to control animated characters and physical robots. There is also an increasing need for analyzing human movements for clinical diagnosis and rehabilitation. Existing tools can be expensive, inefficient, or difficult to use. Using simulated physics and motion capture to develop an interactive virtual reality environment, we capture natural human movements in response to controlled stimuli. This research then applies insights into the mathematics underlying physics simulation to adapt the physics solver to support many important tasks involved in analyzing and synthesizing humanoid movement. These tasks include fitting an articulated physical model to motion capture data, modifying the model pose to achieve a desired configuration (inverse kinematics), inferring internal torques consistent with changing pose data (inverse dynamics), and transferring a movement from one model to another model (retargeting). The result is a powerful and intuitive process for analyzing and synthesizing movement in a single unified framework.Computer Science

Shared control for navigation and balance of a dynamically stable robot.

by Law Kwok Ho Cedric.Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2001.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 106-112).Abstracts in English and Chinese.Chapter 1 --- Introduction --- p.1Chapter 1.1 --- Motivation --- p.1Chapter 1.2 --- Related work --- p.4Chapter 1.3 --- Thesis overview --- p.5Chapter 2 --- Single wheel robot: Gyrover --- p.9Chapter 2.1 --- Background --- p.9Chapter 2.2 --- Robot concept --- p.11Chapter 2.3 --- System description --- p.14Chapter 2.4 --- Flywheel characteristics --- p.16Chapter 2.5 --- Control patterns --- p.20Chapter 3 --- Learning Control --- p.22Chapter 3.1 --- Motivation --- p.22Chapter 3.2 --- Cascade Neural Network with Kalman filtering --- p.24Chapter 3.3 --- Learning architecture --- p.27Chapter 3.4 --- Input space --- p.29Chapter 3.5 --- Model evaluation --- p.30Chapter 3.6 --- Training procedures --- p.35Chapter 4 --- Control Architecture --- p.38Chapter 4.1 --- Behavior-based approach --- p.38Chapter 4.1.1 --- Concept and applications --- p.39Chapter 4.1.2 --- Levels of competence --- p.44Chapter 4.2 --- Behavior-based control of Gyrover: architecture --- p.45Chapter 4.3 --- Behavior-based control of Gyrover: case studies --- p.50Chapter 4.3.1 --- Vertical balancing --- p.51Chapter 4.3.2 --- Tiltup motion --- p.52Chapter 4.4 --- Discussions --- p.53Chapter 5 --- Implement ation of Learning Control --- p.57Chapter 5.1 --- Validation --- p.57Chapter 5.1.1 --- Vertical balancing --- p.58Chapter 5.1.2 --- Tilt-up motion --- p.62Chapter 5.1.3 --- Discussions --- p.62Chapter 5.2 --- Implementation --- p.65Chapter 5.2.1 --- Vertical balanced motion --- p.65Chapter 5.2.2 --- Tilt-up motion --- p.68Chapter 5.3 --- Combined motion --- p.70Chapter 5.4 --- Discussions --- p.72Chapter 6 --- Shared Control --- p.74Chapter 6.1 --- Concept --- p.74Chapter 6.2 --- Schemes --- p.78Chapter 6.2.1 --- Switch mode --- p.79Chapter 6.2.2 --- Distributed mode --- p.79Chapter 6.2.3 --- Combined mode --- p.80Chapter 6.3 --- Shared control of Gyrover --- p.81Chapter 6.4 --- How to share --- p.83Chapter 6.5 --- Experimental study --- p.88Chapter 6.5.1 --- Heading control --- p.89Chapter 6.5.2 --- Straight path --- p.90Chapter 6.5.3 --- Circular path --- p.91Chapter 6.5.4 --- Point-to-point navigation --- p.94Chapter 6.6 --- Discussions --- p.95Chapter 7 --- Conclusion --- p.103Chapter 7.1 --- Contributions --- p.103Chapter 7.2 --- Future work --- p.10

Stochastic Activity Authoring With Direct User Control

Crowd activities are often randomized to create the appearance of heterogeneity. However, the parameters that control randomization are frequently hard to tune because it is unclear how changes at the character level affect the high-level appearance of the crowd. We propose a method for computing randomization parameters that supports direct animator control. Given details about the environment, available activities, timing information and the desired highlevel appearance of the crowd, we model the problem as a graph, formulate a convex optimization problem, and solve for a set of stochastic transition rates which satisfy the constraints. Unlike the use of heuristics for adding randomness to crowd activities, our approach provides guarantees on convergence to the desired result, allows for decentralized simulation, and supports a variety of constraints. In addition, because the rates can be pre-computed, no additional runtime processing is needed during simulation

Perceptual abstraction and attention

This is a report on the preliminary achievements of WP4 of the IM-CleVeR project on abstraction for cumulative learning, in particular directed to: (1) producing algorithms to develop abstraction features under top-down action influence; (2) algorithms for supporting detection of change in motion pictures; (3) developing attention and vergence control on the basis of locally computed rewards; (4) searching abstract representations suitable for the LCAS framework; (5) developing predictors based on information theory to support novelty detection. The report is organized around these 5 tasks that are part of WP4. We provide a synthetic description of the work done for each task by the partners

Robot introspection through learned hidden Markov models

In this paper we describe a machine learning approach for acquiring a model of a robot behaviour from raw sensor data. We are interested in automating the acquisition of behavioural models to provide a robot with an introspective capability. We assume that the behaviour of a robot in achieving a task can be modelled as a finite stochastic state transition system. Beginning with data recorded by a robot in the execution of a task, we use unsupervised learning techniques to estimate a hidden Markov model (HMM) that can be used both for predicting and explaining the behaviour of the robot in subsequent executions of the task. We demonstrate that it is feasible to automate the entire process of learning a high quality HMM from the data recorded by the robot during execution of its task.The learned HMM can be used both for monitoring and controlling the behaviour of the robot. The ultimate purpose of our work is to learn models for the full set of tasks associated with a given problem domain, and to integrate these models with a generative task planner. We want to show that these models can be used successfully in controlling the execution of a plan. However, this paper does not develop the planning and control aspects of our work, focussing instead on the learning methodology and the evaluation of a learned model. The essential property of the models we seek to construct is that the most probable trajectory through a model, given the observations made by the robot, accurately diagnoses, or explains, the behaviour that the robot actually performed when making these observations. In the work reported here we consider a navigation task. We explain the learning process, the experimental setup and the structure of the resulting learned behavioural models. We then evaluate the extent to which explanations proposed by the learned models accord with a human observer's interpretation of the behaviour exhibited by the robot in its execution of the task

Control Implementation of Dynamic Locomotion on Compliant, Underactuated, Force-Controlled Legged Robots with Non-Anthropomorphic Design

The control of locomotion on legged robots traditionally involves a robot that takes a standard legged form, such as the anthropomorphic humanoid, the dog-like quadruped, or the bird-like biped. Additionally, these systems will often be actuated with position-controlled servos or series-elastic actuators that are connected through rigid links. This work investigates the control implementation of dynamic, force-controlled locomotion on a family of legged systems that significantly deviate from these classic paradigms by incorporating modern, state-of-the-art proprioceptive actuators on uniquely configured compliant legs that do not closely resemble those found in nature. The results of this work can be used to better inform how to implement controllers on legged systems without stiff, position-controlled actuators, and also provide insight on how intelligently designed mechanical features can potentially simplify the control of complex, nonlinear dynamical systems like legged robots. To this end, this work presents the approach to control for a family of non-anthropomorphic bipedal robotic systems which are developed both in simulation and with physical hardware. The first is the Non-Anthropomorphic Biped, Version 1 (NABi-1) that features position-controlled joints along with a compliant foot element on a minimally actuated leg, and is controlled using simple open-loop trajectories based on the Zero Moment Point. The second system is the second version of the non-anthropomorphic biped (NABi-2) which utilizes the proprioceptive Back-drivable Electromagnetic Actuator for Robotics (BEAR) modules for actuation and fully realizes feedback-based force controlled locomotion. These systems are used to highlight both the strengths and weaknesses of utilizing proprioceptive actuation in systems, and suggest the tradeoffs that are made when using force control for dynamic locomotion. These systems also present case studies for different approaches to system design when it comes to bipedal legged robots

Intelligent strategies for mobile robotics in laboratory automation

In this thesis a new intelligent framework is presented for the mobile robots in laboratory automation, which includes: a new multi-floor indoor navigation method is presented and an intelligent multi-floor path planning is proposed; a new signal filtering method is presented for the robots to forecast their indoor coordinates; a new human feature based strategy is proposed for the robot-human smart collision avoidance; a new robot power forecasting method is proposed to decide a distributed transportation task; a new blind approach is presented for the arm manipulations for the robots

Robotics 2010

Without a doubt, robotics has made an incredible progress over the last decades. The vision of developing, designing and creating technical systems that help humans to achieve hard and complex tasks, has intelligently led to an incredible variety of solutions. There are barely technical fields that could exhibit more interdisciplinary interconnections like robotics. This fact is generated by highly complex challenges imposed by robotic systems, especially the requirement on intelligent and autonomous operation. This book tries to give an insight into the evolutionary process that takes place in robotics. It provides articles covering a wide range of this exciting area. The progress of technical challenges and concepts may illuminate the relationship between developments that seem to be completely different at first sight. The robotics remains an exciting scientific and engineering field. The community looks optimistically ahead and also looks forward for the future challenges and new development