Marika Hayashi

Development of soft stretchable knit sensor for humanoids' whole-body tactile sensibility

In order for humanoid robots to behave with soft contacts among humans, whole-body tactile sensing function is indispensable. For enclosing whole-body regions of a humanoid, softness and the stretchable property is necessary especially for the regions around joints. Although there are some studies to realize a whole-body enclosing-type tactile sensing exterior so far, most of them have difficulties to enclose the joint regions. Therefore, we propose the method to construct a soft stretchable enclosing type tactile sensing exterior using electro-conductive knitting structure and about 200% stretchable and pressure sensitive exterior can be realized. Furthermore cardigan type knit sensor exterior is developed and the feasibility of the proposed method is confirmed through behavior experiments by a humanoid wearing the developed cardigan knit sensor.

Development of soft sensor exterior embedded with multi-axis deformable tactile sensor system

In some important robotic human daily life support applications, such as housework or nursing care, soft sensor exterior is needed for allowing close contacts against humans or environments. Although there are many studies on tactile sensing elements themselves and some of them realize the mechanical softness of the element, most of their studies just propose their detection theory with their sensor element prototypes and it is difficult to use them for developing soft tactile exterior. Therefore a soft sensor exterior embedded with multi-axis deformation sensor is developed in this paper. The most important feature for this sensor is that it can detect multi-axis deformation, and the sensor element itself has enough softness to deform with the outer exterior. The developed sensor is constructed by molding a soft urethane foam with infrared LEDs and corresponding phototransistors. It detects 3D deformation of the sensor as voltage changes at each phototransistors. Furthermore, a prototype of soft sensor exterior embedded with the developed sensing elements is realized and we confirmed that the 3D deformation, such as stroking, pinching, and pushing, can be detected using the developed sensor exterior prototype.

Development of muscle-driven flexible-spine humanoids

Aiming at opening up a new stage of humanoid robotics, we have been studying on the mechanically soft structure for humanoids and have developed a full-body muscle-driven flexible-spine humanoid robots. In this paper, we discuss body structure of humanoids, describing the advantages of musculoskeletal flexible body and briefly introducing the previous works on constructing hardware and software of flexible spine robots. This paper also presents the design and development of a novel musculoskeletal humanoid named Kotaro

Design and development of a humanoid with Soft 3D-deformable sensor flesh and automatic recoverable mechanical overload protection mechanism

In order for robots to be able to assist humans at a very close distance, robots should allow contacts occurred at many places and deal with them. For realizing such functions, robots should have whole-body soft sensor exterior for preparing contacts against almost every body parts since it is difficult to limit where to be touched from humans.

Behavior integration for whole-body close interactions by a humanoid with soft sensor flesh

In order for humanoids to be able to have close interactions with humans or environments using whole body contacts, development of humanoids with soft sensor flesh is one of the key issues. Therefore we have been developed dasiamacrapsila, a humanoid with soft sensor flesh, and it can sense distributed 3D force directions during interaction behavior with humans or environments. However, development of such hardware system itself is not enough. For utilizing the hardware ability more effectively, design of interaction behavior using rich sensor information including tactile sensors is indispensable. Clearly, the analytical design for the specific task is getting harder for such humanoids. This is because those kinds of humanoids are expected to have many contact points with outer environments during their interaction behavior. Also, many locally occurred events, which humanoids have to response, are detected by the distributed sensors. In order to deal with such complex circumstances, behavior integration system is introduced in the interaction behavior of the humanoids with soft sensor flesh. By introducing such behavior integration system, adaptability to many local events can be added incrementally. Also the analytically designed and slightly limited behaviors can be accumulated for generating next richer behavior during the close interactions with humans or outer environments. As such behavior integration system, dasiaParallel Evaluating Monitorspsila are introduced and applied to the macras interaction behaviors with humans and environments in this paper.

Design and Development of a Small Stereovision Sensor Module for Small Self-Contained Autonomous Robots

We designed a small stereovision (SSV) sensor module for easily adding visual functions to a small robot and enabling their use. The SSV sensor module concept includes 1) a vision sensor module containing a camera and a visual processor and 2) connecting to a robot system through general-purpose interface. This design enables the use of visual functions as ordinary sensors such, as touch or ultra-sonic sensors, by simply connecting a generalpurpose interface port such as an IO port or serial connector. We developed a prototype module with small CMOS image sensors for a mobile phone and a 16 bit microprocessor. The 30 40mm prototype is small enough to attach even to palm-top robots. Our module demonstrates image processing including binarization, color extraction and labeling, and template matching. We developed self-contained robots, including a 2DOF head robot, a humanoid robot, and a palm-top robot, and realized vision-based autonomous behavior.

Development of whole body multisensory soft flesh with vibrotactile and deep pressure sense for humanoid close interaction

In this paper, a ldquofleshrdquo of a humanoid robot with multisensory superficial sense is described. In order for a robot to behave in contact with an environment and people, it is necessary to have rich superficial sense. We have developed a humanoid robot with thick soft cover s with three-axis force/torque sensors inside the covers. The thick cover configuration enables holding multiple kinds of sensors, which configuration is supposed to be useful for rich tactile sensing. In order to investigate the capability of this superficial sensor configuration, additional sensors were examined and implemented to investigate possible and effective multisensory soft covers.

Acquisition of behavior modifier based on geometric proto-symbol manipulation and its application to motion generation

In this paper, we focused on concepts of behavior modifier. We aim to build a system, which acquires concepts of behavior modifier and applies it to motion generation of robots. For a form of motion representation, an existing research achievement, which statistically abstracts motion with known sets of motion examples and represents motions as points in a space, was adopted. Our system uses tendency of motions with adverbial modifier in the space to represent concepts of behavior modifier. The system has a simple representation form and has interactiveness what has potential advantage of ability to be applied to various motion concepts.