Intelligent robots

The increasing demand for robotic applications in dynamic unstructured environments is motivating the need for dextrous end-effectors which can cope with the wide variety of tasks and objects encountered in these environments. The human hand is a very complex grasping tool that can handle objects of different sizes and shapes. Many research activities have been carried out to develop artificial robot hands with capabilities similar to the human hand. In this paper the mechanism and design of a new humanoid-type hand (called TUAT/Karlsruhe Humanoid Hand) with human-like manipulation abilities is discussed. The new hand is designed for the humanoid robot ARMAR which has to work autonomously or interactively in cooperation with humans and for an artificial lightweight arm for handicapped persons. The arm is developed as close as possible to the human arm and is driven by spherical ultrasonic motors. The ideal end-effector for such an artificial arm or a humanoid would be able to use the tools and objects that a person uses when working in the same environment. Therefore a new hand is designed for anatomical consistency with the human hand. This includes the number of fingers and the placement and motion of the thumb, the proportions of the link lengths and the shape of the palm. It can also perform most part of human grasping types. The TUAT/Karlsruhe Humanoid Hand possesses 20 DOF and is driven by one actuator which can be placed into or around the hand.

A novel framework of biped walking stabilization control is introduced. The target robot is a 42 DOF humanoid robot HRP-4C which has a body dimensions close to the average Japanese female. We develop a body posture controller and foot force controllers on the joint position servo of the robot. By applying this posture/force control, we can regard the robot system as a simple linear inverted pendulum with ZMP delay. After a preliminary experiment to confirm the linear dynamics, we design a tracking controller for walking stabilization. It is evaluated in the experiments of HRP-4C walking and turning on a lab floor. The robot can also perform an outdoor walk on an uneven pavement.

Omnidirectional cameras have a wide field of view and are thus used in many robotic vision tasks. An omnidirectional view may be acquired by a fisheye camera which provides a full image compared to catadioptric visual sensors and do not increase the size and the weakness of the imaging system with respect to perspective cameras. We prove that the unified model for catadioptric systems can model fisheye cameras with distortions directly included in its parameters. This unified projection model consists on a projection onto a virtual unitary sphere, followed by a perspective projection onto an image plane. The validity of this assumption is discussed and compared with other existing models. Calibration and partial Euclidean reconstruction results help to confirm the validity of our approach. Finally, an application to the visual servoing of a mobile robot is presented and experimented.

This paper reports progress in the development of a humanoid robot designed for real-time face-to-face interaction with humans. An essential component for face-to-face interaction with humans is being able to find faces, tracking them, and smoothly moving back and forth between gazing to a face and other objects of interest. In this paper we propose a system that integrates peripheral vision and foveal vision in a principled manner using particle filters. The developed system generates hypotheses about face position by using ...

During the last decade, there has been significant progress toward a supervised autonomous robotic capability for remotely controlled scientific exploration of planetary surfaces. While planetary exploration potentially encompasses many elements ranging from orbital remote sensing to subsurface drilling, the surface robotics element is particularly important to advancing in situ science objectives. Surface activities include a direct characterization of geology, mineralogy,