Junya Fujimoto

Humanoid motion generation system on HRP2-JSK for daily life environment

This paper describes software system for a humanoid robot viewed from a motion generation aspect by taking kitchen helping behaviors as an example of a real world task. Our software consists of high level reasoning modules including 3D geometric model based action/motion planner and runtime modules contains 3D visual processor, force manipulation controller and walking controller. We discuss how a high level motion and action planner based motion generation functions contribute to various real world humanoid tasks and a role of perception based motion generation using a vision sensor and force sensors.

Picking up dishes based on active groping with multisensory robot hand

In this paper we present a new method for picking up dishes based on active groping. Though a birds eye view is commonly used to recognize dishes, this method tends to produce errors in the presence of large occlusion, A multisensory robot hand can be used in a kitchen environment to probe and grasp dishes that are placed close to each other. Though sensing is an effective method, it is difficult to recognize a dish globally by this method because of the locality of measurement. To solve this difficulty, we propose a sensing method to aquire the geometric information about dishes by tracing their surface. We demonstrate that a robot can pick up three types of dishes on the basis of this active groping strategy by conducting an experiment.

Enhanced Mother Environment with Humanoid Specialization in IRT Robot Systems

In the research to realize high standard task-oriented assistant robots, a general and strategic way of development is essential. Otherwise high functionality and potential for evolution of those robots cannot be achieved. Robotic systems are socially expected to assist our daily life in many situations. As a result, projects related to those robots are becoming large, involving many researchers and engineers of universities and companies. This motivated us a new strategy to construct robotic systems based on mother environment and humanoid specialization to keep developing and refining functional elements of robots in an evolutionary way. The mother environment is an entity that creates brains of humanoid robots, where various robotics function elements, libraries, middle-wares and other research tools are integrated. Then the brain of each robot is developed utilizing the functional elements in the mother. We call this process specialization of a humanoid. To enhance this specialization process, we introduce a generator, which realizes conversion of functions in the mother environment for the real-time layer. After the research of these specific robots, enhanced robotics functions are incorporated into the mother again. We call this process feedback. In this chapter, we present these ideas using concrete implementation examples in IRT projects[1], where several robots to assist our daily life are developed.