Probo is a social robot intended to be used with children in a hospital environment to provide them with information, moral support and to comfort them in a possible difficult time. This paper reports on the early stages in the development of the expressive huggable robot Probo with potential applications for Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) and Robot-Assisted Therapy (RAT). Drawing on research in...

Human motion can provide a rich source of examples for use in robot grasping and manipulation. Adapting human examples to a robot manipulator is a difficult problem, however, in part due to differences between human and robot hands. Even hands that are anthropomorphic in external design may differ dramatically from the human hand in ability to grasp and manipulate objects due to internal design...

In this paper an anthropomorphic robot arm is de scribed for service tasks The paper focus mainly on the mechatronics concept of the arm which gets its inspiration from the biology of the human arm This includes the mechanical design kinematical mod elling the range of motion the sensor concept and the hierarchical control architecture

Attitudes toward robots influence the tendency to accept or reject robotic devices. Thus it is important to investigate whether and how attitudes toward robots can change. In this pilot study we investigate attitudinal changes in elderly citizens toward a tele-operated robot in relation to three parameters: (i) the information provided about robot functionality, (ii) the number of encounters, (...

Recently, the research on humanoid robots has attracted many researchers. The research spans from stability and optimal control, gait generation, human-robot and robot-robot communication. In addition, humanoid robots have been also used to understand better human motion. Among humanoid robot prototypes the most well known is Honda humanoid robot (Hirai et. al., 1998). This robot has the abilit...

The reference joint position of upper-limb exoskeletons is typically obtained by means of Cartesian motion planners and inverse kinematics algorithms with the inverse Jacobian; this approach allows exploiting the available Degrees of Freedom (i.e. DoFs) of the robot kinematic chain to achieve the desired end-effector pose; however, if used to operate non-redundant exoskeletons, it does not ensu...

The authors have focused on the bipedal humanoid robot expected to play an active role in human living space, through studies on an anthropomorphic biped walking robot. As the first stage of developing a bipedal humanoid robot, the authors developed the human-size 35 active DOF bipedal humanoid robot “WABIAN” and the human-size 41 active DOF bipedal humanoid robot “ WABIAN-R”. The authors also ...

The paper focuses on design and control of a new anthropomorphic robot arm enabling the torque measurement in each joint to ensure safety while performing tasks of physical interaction with human and environment. When the contact of the robot arm with an object occurs, local admittance algorithm provides active compliance of corresponding robot arm joint. Thus, the whole structure of the manipu...