Most human-robot interfaces, such as joysticks and keyboards, require training and constant cognitive effort and provide a limited degree of awareness of the robots state and its environment. Embodied interactions, instead of interfaces, could bridge the gap between humans and robots, allowing humans to naturally perceive and act through a distal robotic body. Establishing an embodied interacti...

NASA's latest anthropomorphic robot, Robonaut, has reached a milestone in its capability. This highly dexterous robot, designed to assist astronauts in space, is now performing complex tasks at the Johnson Space Center that could previously only be carried out by humans. With 43 degrees of freedom, Robonaut is the first humanoid built for space and incorporates technology advances in dexterous ...

The ultimate goal of our study is to create a new speech production system, in which an anthropomorphic hardware talking robot is handled so as to imitate human articulatory movement. We have developed a software motion simulator, which generates control parameter sequences for the talking robot Waseda Talker No. 2 (WT-2) using the trajectories of human articulatory organs during continuous utt...

Children ranging from 3 to 5 years were introduced to two anthropomorphic robots that provided them with information about unfamiliar animals. Children treated the robots as interlocutors. They supplied information to the robots and retained what the robots told them. Children also treated the robots as informants from whom they could seek information. Consistent with studies of children's earl...

The developmental approach enables us to build adaptive robots, and furthermore, to understand the essence of intelligence from the constructivist viewpoint. In this paper, a new design principle for tactile sensors is proposed to investigate and to utilize developmental processes of robots. Based on the design principle, an anthropomorphic fingertip is developed. The fingertip is made of soft ...

In this paper we present the autonomous, walking humanoids Priscilla, ELVIS and ELVINA and an experiment using evolutionary adaptive systems. We also present the anthropomorphic principles behind our humanoid project and the multistage development methodology. The adaptive evolutionary system used is a steady state evolutionary strategy running on the robot’s onboard computer. Individuals are e...

A highly anthropomorphic human scale robot hand designed for space based operations is presented. This five finger hand combined with its integrated wrist and forearm has fourteen independent degrees of freedom. The device approximates very well the kinematics and required strength of an astronaut's hand when operating through a pressurized space suit glove. The mechanisms used to meet these re...

Different solutions are used on driving simulators to provide visual feedback. In this study, we investigated the influence of projection technology and field of view on drivers‟ performance in a slalom driving task. We tested a head mounted display against a curved projection system on our CyberMotion simulator, based on an anthropomorphic robot arm. The results showed that drivers performed s...

This paper describes a novel approach to capsular endoscopy that takes advantage of active magnetic locomotion in the gastrointestinal tract guided by an anthropomorphic robotic arm. Simulations were performed to select the design parameters allowing an effective and reliable magnetic link between the robot end-effector (endowed with a permanent magnet) and the capsular device (endowed with sma...

In this paper, we have reported results of the experimental tests for validating and characterizing a new design and its operation for a humanoid robot arm with one actuator only. The core of the arm system consists of clutches that are activated or deactivated according to a programmed manipulation path-planning. Experimental tests are discussed with measured results to characterize the functi...