Natural human–robot musical interaction: understanding the music conductor gestures by using the WB-4 inertial measurement system

This paper presents an inertial measurement unit-based human gesture recognition system for a robot instrument player to understand the instructions dictated by an orchestra conductor and accordingly adapt its musical performance. It is an extension of our previous publications on natural human–robot musical interaction. With this system, the robot can understand the real-time variations in musical parameters dictated by the conductor’s movements, adding expression to its performance while being synchronized with all the other human partner musicians. The enhanced interaction ability would obviously lead to an improvement of the overall live performance, but also allow the partner musicians, as well as the conductor, to better appreciate a joint musical performance, thanks to the complete naturalness of the interaction.     

Telenoid android robot as an embodied perceptual social regulation medium engaging natural human–humanoid interaction

The present paper aims to validate our research on human–humanoid interaction (HHI) using the minimalist humanoid robot Telenoid. We conducted the human–robot interaction test with 142 young people who had no prior interaction experience with this robot. The main goal is the analysis of the two social dimensions (“Perception” and “Believability”) useful for increasing the natural behaviour between users and Telenoid. We administered our custom questionnaire to human subjects in association with a well defined experimental setting (“ordinary and goal-guided task”). A thorough analysis of the questionnaires has been carried out and reliability and internal consistency in correlation between the multiple items has been calculated. Our experimental results show that the perceptual behaviour and believability, as implicit social competences, could improve the meaningfulness and the natural-like sense of human–humanoid interaction in everyday life task-driven activities. Telenoid is perceived as an autonomous cooperative agent for a shared environment by human beings.     

Recognition of Affective Communicative Intent in Robot-Directed Speech

Human speech provides a natural and intuitive interface for both communicating with humanoid robots as well as for teaching them. In general, the acoustic pattern of speech contains three kinds of information: who the speaker is, what the speaker said, and how the speaker said it. This paper focuses on the question of recognizing affective communicative intent in robot-directed speech without looking into the linguistic content. We present an approach for recognizing four distinct prosodic patterns that communicate praise, prohibition, attention, and comfort to preverbal infants. These communicative intents are well matched to teaching a robot since praise, prohibition, and directing the robot's attention to relevant aspects of a task, could be used by a human instructor to intuitively facilitate the robot's learning process. We integrate this perceptual ability into our robot's emotion system, thereby allowing a human to directly manipulate the robot's affective state. This has a powerful organizing influence on the robot's behavior, and will ultimately be used to socially communicate affective reinforcement. Communicative efficacy has been tested with people very familiar with the robot as well as with naïve subjects.     

Theory of Mind for a Humanoid Robot

If we are to build human-like robots that can interact naturally with people, our robots must know not only about the properties of objects but also the properties of animate agents in the world. One of the fundamental social skills for humans is the attribution of beliefs, goals, and desires to other people. This set of skills has often been called a theory of mind. This paper presents the theories of Leslie (1994) and Baron-Cohen (1995) on the development of theory of mind in human children and discusses the potential application of both of these theories to building robots with similar capabilities. Initial implementation details and basic skills (such as finding faces and eyes and distinguishing animate from inanimate stimuli) are introduced. I further speculate on the usefulness of a robotic implementation in evaluating and comparing these two models.     

Expressing reactive emotion based on multimodal emotion recognition for natural conversation in human–robot interaction*

Human–human interaction consists of various nonverbal behaviors that are often emotion-related. To establish rapport, it is essential that the listener respond to reactive emotion in a way that makes sense given the speaker's emotional state. However, human–robot interactions generally fail in this regard because most spoken dialogue systems play only a question-answer role. Aiming for natural conversation, we examine an emotion processing module that consists of a user emotion recognition function and a reactive emotion expression function for a spoken dialogue system to improve human–robot interaction. For the emotion recognition function, we propose a method that combines valence from prosody and sentiment from text by decision-level fusion, which considerably improves the performance. Moreover, this method reduces fatal recognition errors, thereby improving the user experience. For the reactive emotion expression function, the system's emotion is divided into emotion category and emotion level, which are predicted using the parameters estimated by the recognition function on the basis of distributions inferred from human–human dialogue data. As a result, the emotion processing module can recognize the user's emotion from his/her speech, and expresses a reactive emotion that matches. Evaluation with ten participants demonstrated that the system enhanced by this module is effective to conduct natural conversation.     

仿人跑步机器人稳定性与控制策略研究进展

针对仿人跑步机器人稳定性和控制策略的研究现状与发展趋势进行了探讨.首先.分析了仿人跑步模型的固有特性,包括单边约束特性、系统混杂特性和变拓扑结构特性,介绍了基于ZMP(Zero Moment Point)和零化角动量的稳定性判据以及基于庞加莱映射和极限环的稳定性判据,总结了基于轨迹规划的时变控制策略和基于虚拟约束的定常...     

Remote Interaction between Human and Humanoid Robot

The last few years have been characterized by the continuous development of information and communication technologies, robotics technologies, and home automation technologies. The number of application areas for such technologies is increasing, especially in fields rather outside the pure industrial scenario, often identified as service applications. These are healthcare, public service provisions, social services for disadvantaged citizens, technical aids for promoting the independence of disabled and elderly people, and many others.With this joint research Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna and Waseda University, starting from the current availability of several mechatronic prototypes in their research laboratories, intend to validate different telecommunication tools for the remote control of mechatronic systems by demonstrating the feasibility and potential benefits deriving from the integration of such technologies.     

任务导向的仿人机器人体系结构设计*

从仿人机器人任务实现过程出发,提出了一种基于任务的分层混合式仿人机器人体系结构。在该体系结构下,多个agent分别被用来模拟人的各主要器官的功能,并模仿人类的行为方式实现了任务实现过程中的三个主要部分:人机交互、导航和对象操作。该体系结构对于高智能水平的仿人机器人的研究和开发具有重要意义。     

Robonaut: a robot designed to work with humans in space

The Robotics Technology Branch at the NASA Johnson Space Center is developing robotic systems to assist astronauts in space. One such system, Robonaut, is a humanoid robot with the dexterity approaching that of a suited astronaut. Robonaut currently has two dexterous arms and hands, a three degree-of-freedom articulating waist, and a two degree-of-freedom neck used as a camera and sensor platform. In contrast to other space manipulator systems, Robonaut is designed to work within existing corridors and use the same tools as space walking astronauts. Robonaut is envisioned as working with astronauts, both autonomously and by teleoperation, performing a variety of tasks including, routine maintenance, setting up and breaking down worksites, assisting crew members while outside of spacecraft, and serving in a rapid response capacity.     

Human–robot collision model with effective mass and manipulability for design of a spatial manipulator

As the use of service robots becomes more popular, many solutions to ensure human safety during human–robot collision have been proposed. In this paper, we address one of the most fundamental solutions to design an inherently safe robot manipulator. A collision model is developed to evaluate the collision safety of any spatial manipulator. Most collision studies have focused on collision analysis and safety evaluation, but not on the use of evaluation results to design a safer robot arm. Therefore, we propose a collision model that relates design parameters to collision safety by adopting effective mass and manipulability. The model was then simplified with several assumptions. Furthermore, experimental results from biomechanical literature were employed to describe a human–robot collision. The major advantage of this collision model is that it can be used to systemically determine the design parameters of a robot arm.     

仿人机器人动态步行控制综述

综述了仿人机器人动态步行的研究历史和研究现状。归纳了动态步行的特点,分析了动态步行稳定性判定方法,介绍了基于ZMP的姿态稳定判据和基于庞加莱映射（Poincaré Map）的步态稳定判据。总结了仿人机器人学习适应复杂地面环境步行的方法,概述了动态步行控制实现的典型解决方案,指出了动态步行控制中待解决的问题,并探讨了未来的发展方向。