Humanoid robotics is a promising field because the strong human preference to interact with anthropomorphic interfaces. Despite this, humanoid robots are far from reaching main stream adoption and the features available in such robots seem to lag that of the latest smartphones. A fragmented robot ecosystem and low incentives to developers do not help to foster the creation of Robot-Apps either....

The goal of robot learning from demonstration is to have a robot learn from watching a demonstration of the task to be performed. In our approach to learning from demonstration the robot learns a reward function from the demonstration and a task model from repeated attempts to perform the task. A policy is computed based on the learned reward function and task model. Lessons learned from an imp...

“Without embodiment artificial intelligence is nothing.” Algorithms in the field of artificial intelligence are mostly tested on a computer instead of testing on a real platform. Our anthropomorphic robot ZAR5 (in German ZweiArm-Roboter in the 5 version) is the first biologically inspired and completely artificial muscle driven robot torso that can be fully controlled by a data suit and two fiv...

In this article we present a new approach for the control of a redundant robot arm. Our approach contains two parts: first, we have implemented a concept which deals with the underdetermined problem of the inverse kinematics of robot arms with more than six degrees of freedom. This concept guarantees a one-to-one mapping between the task coordinates (position and orientation) and the joint coor...

In this article, we describe the development of an autonomous robot, Cherry the Little Red Robot, whose functionality we designed so that she could socially interact with humans on a daily basis in the context of an office suite environment. Cherry has a given set of office-tasks to accomplish, from giving tours of our computer science faculty suite to visitors, to serving beverages to those fa...

concept of 'manipulability' is particularly important to characterize the ability of a serial kinematic chain – artificial manipulator or natural limb – to move quickly its end-effector in any direction of its operational space in response to given joint velocities. Yoshikawa's manipulability definition has shown its benefit for robotics. According to him the robot manipulability can be measure...

This paper describes the evolution of Assistant Personal Robot (APR) project developed at Robotics Laboratory University Lleida, Spain. first APR-01 prototype developed, basic hardware improvement, specific anthropomorphic improvements, and preference surveys conducted with engineering students from same university in order to maximize perceived affinity final APR-02 mobile robot prototype. The...

Domestic tasks require three main skills from autonomous robots: robust navigation, object manipulation, and intuitive communication with the users. Most robot platforms, however, support only one or two of the above skills. In this paper we present Dynamaid, a new robot platform for research on domestic service applications. For robust navigation, Dynamaid has a base with four individually ste...

This paper makes the case for designing interactive robots with their expressive movement in mind. As people are highly sensitive to physical movement and spatiotemporal affordances, well-designed robot motion can communicate, engage, and offer dynamic possibilities beyond the machines’ surface appearance or pragmatic motion paths. We present techniques for movement centric design, including ch...

Previously we have presented a model for generating human-like arm and hand movements on an unimanual anthropomorphic robot involved in human-robot collaboration tasks. The present paper aims to extend our model in order to address the generation of human-like bimanual movement sequences which are challenged by scenarios cluttered with obstacles. Movement planning involves large scale nonlinear...