This paper presents the design of an anthropomorphic robotic hand of low-budget, achieving basic grasps similar to the human hand. The hand has an anthropomorphic design with 16 degrees of freedom (DOFs). With 14 Mckibben style pneumatic air muscles (PAM) implemented as the power actuator of the tendon-driven fingers, the actuator offers the robotic hand a compliant, soft grasp for manipulating...

This paper describes a technique for autonomously exploring a complex steel bridge environment using a 6DOF anthropomorphic robotic arm, instrumented with a laser range scanner. Potential knowledge gained from a 3D range scan at an end-effector position and orientation (pose) is estimated, then arm configurations which avoid obstacles and unknown areas are computed using an optimisation approac...

Playing table tennis is a difficult motor task which requires fast movements, accurate control and adaptation to task parameters. Although human beings see and move slower than most robot systems they outperform all table tennis robots significantly. In this paper we study human table tennis and present a robot system that mimics human striking behavior. Therefore we model the human movements i...

In this article, we set forth a detailed analysis of the mechanical characteristics of anthropomorphic prosthetic hands. We report on an empirical study concerning the performance of several commercially available myoelectric prosthetic hands, including the Vincent, iLimb, iLimb Pulse, Bebionic, Bebionic v2, and Michelangelo hands. We investigated the finger design and kinematics, mechanical jo...

(Bio)mechanical models of human body are important tools in understanding the functional principles of human movement and coordination as well as they have widespread applications for the industrial, scientific and medical purposes. In this paper (bio)mechanical models of the upper human limb (arm, forearm and hand, 7 degree-of– freedoms ( DOFs)), upper torso and right arm (15 DOFs) and of the ...

Robot’s sound feedback can have either speech or non-speech interface. Since a telepresence robot (FURo-i Home) is a robot intended to be used in remote communication where conveying the presence of the communicators is essential, this study investigated the effect of anthropomorphic sound interface on perceived copresence, telepresence and social presence of the communicator. We executed a 2 (...

The paper describes the recent advancements gained on the MPI motion simulator project. The aim of this project is the use of an anthropomorphic robot as actuation system for a motion platform intended for real time flight simulation. Almost all commercially available motion platforms rely on the so called Stewart platform, that is a 6-DOF platform that can bear high payloads and can achieve hi...

Developmental theories suggest that children initially conceptualize God in concrete, anthropomorphic terms. In contrast, recent research has found that from early on, children recognize God as a being radically different from humans. Previous research has been limited to studies of Christian children. The present study questioned children and adults raised in a religious tradition (Church of J...

In this paper, we show how a simulated anthropomorphic robotic arm controlled by an artificial neural network can develop effective reaching and grasping behaviour through a trial and error process in which the free parameters encode the control rules which regulate the fine-grained interaction between the robot and the environment and variations of the free parameters are retained or discarded...

The field of humanoids robotics is widely recognized as the current challenge for robotics research. Developing humanoids poses fascinating problems in the realization of manipulation capability, which is still one of most complex problem in robotics. The paper, starting from an overview of current activities in the development of humanoid robots, with special focus on manipulation, presents th...