Biomimetic Approaches for Human Arm Motion Generation: Literature Review and Future Directions

In recent years, numerous studies have been conducted to analyze how humans subconsciously optimize various performance criteria while performing a particular task, which has led to the development of robots that are capable of performing tasks with a similar level of efficiency as humans. The complexity of the human body has led researchers to create a framework for robot motion planning to recreate those motions in robotic systems using various redundancy resolution methods. This study conducts a thorough analysis of the relevant literature to provide a detailed exploration of the different redundancy resolution methodologies used in motion generation for mimicking human motion. The studies are investigated and categorized according to the study methodology and various redundancy resolution methods. An examination of the literature revealed a strong trend toward formulating intrinsic strategies that govern human movement through machine learning and artificial intelligence. Subsequently, the paper critically evaluates the existing approaches and highlights their limitations. It also identifies the potential research areas that hold promise for future investigations.

Client-Server Approach for Managing Visual Attention, Integrated in a Cognitive Architecture for a Social Robot

This paper proposes a novel system for managing visual attention in social robots. This system is based on a client/server approach that allows integration with a cognitive architecture controlling the robot. The core of this architecture is a distributed knowledge graph, in which the perceptual needs are expressed by the presence of arcs to stimuli that need to be perceived. The attention server sends motion commands to the actuators of the robot, while the attention clients send requests through the common knowledge representation. The common knowledge graph is shared by all levels of the architecture. This system has been implemented on ROS and tested on a social robot to verify the validity of the approach and was used to solve the tests proposed in RoboCup @ Home and SciROc robotic competitions. The tests have been used to quantitatively compare the proposal to traditional visual attention mechanisms.

Affective Communication for Socially Assistive Robots (SARs) for Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder: A Systematic Review

Research on affective communication for socially assistive robots has been conducted to enable physical robots to perceive, express, and respond emotionally. However, the use of affective computing in social robots has been limited, especially when social robots are designed for children, and especially those with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Social robots are based on cognitive-affective models, which allow them to communicate with people following social behaviors and rules. However, interactions between a child and a robot may change or be different compared to those with an adult or when the child has an emotional deficit. In this study, we systematically reviewed studies related to computational models of emotions for children with ASD. We used the Scopus, WoS, Springer, and IEEE-Xplore databases to answer different research questions related to the definition, interaction, and design of computational models supported by theoretical psychology approaches from 1997 to 2021. Our review found 46 articles; not all the studies considered children or those with ASD.

A performance comparison between closed form and numerical optimization solutions for humanoid robot walking pattern generation

This article presents the modeling process of the lower part of a humanoid biped robot in terms of kinematic/dynamic states and the creation of a full dynamic simulation environment for a walking robot using MATLAB/Simulink. This article presents two different approaches for offline walking pattern generation: one relying on a closed-form solution of the linear inverted pendulum model (LIPM) mathematical model and another that considers numerical optimization as means of desired output trajectory following for a cart table state-space model. This article then investigates the possibility of introducing solution-dependent modifications to both approaches that could increase the reliability of basic walking pattern generation models in terms of smooth single support–double support phase transitioning and power consumption optimization. The algorithms were coded into offline walking pattern generators for NAO humanoid robot as a valid example and the two approaches were compared against each other in terms of stability, power consumption, and computational effort as well as against their basic unmodified counterparts.

Can communication with social robots influence how children develop empathy? Best-evidence synthesis

Social robots are gradually entering children’s lives in a period when children learn about social relationships and exercise prosocial behaviors with parents, peers, and teachers. Designed for long-term emotional engagement and to take the roles of friends, teachers, and babysitters, such robots have the potential to influence how children develop empathy. This article presents a review of the literature (2010–2020) in the fields of human–robot interaction (HRI), psychology, neuropsychology, and roboethics, discussing the potential impact of communication with social robots on children’s social and emotional development. The critical analysis of evidence behind these discussions shows that, although robots theoretically have high chances of influencing the development of empathy in children, depending on their design, intensity, and context of use, there is no certainty about the kind of effect they might have. Most of the analyzed studies, which showed the ability of robots to improve empathy levels in children, were not longitudinal, while the studies observing and arguing for the negative effect of robots on children’s empathy were either purely theoretical or dependent on the specific design of the robot and the situation. Therefore, there is a need for studies investigating the effects on children’s social and emotional development of long-term regular and consistent communication with robots of various designs and in different situations.

Single-support heel-off: a crucial gait event helps realizing agile and energy-efficient bipedal walking

Single-support heel-off occurs when the heel of the trailing leg has been lifted from the ground around its toe, while the leading leg is still swinging forward. A similar gait event occurs during human walking, and is crucial to achieve a longer step length and a higher walking speed. In this paper, this crucial gait event is studied, specifically in how it influences the agility and the energy efficiency of bipedal walking. Toward this goal, the concept of limit-cycle bipedal walking which possesses natural and energy-efficient gaits is employed. The aforementioned concept is applied to a flat-foot bipedal model which is developed and actuated by a constant hip torque only during the single-support phase to walk on the ground. The impedance of each ankle is adjusted by using two springs, one at the back-side and the other at the front-side, as well as one damper. In comparison with point/round foot bipedal models, the flat-foot bipedal model produces more versatile limit-cycle gaits comprised of a number of gait series, each of which is a sequence detected among twelve gait postures dictated by the kinetics of the unilateral constraints at the heel, toe, or both. As a result of comprehensive simulations, it is concluded that single-support heel-off significantly improves the agility of bipedal walking because of the increase in the step length and the walking speed. Furthermore, even though limit-cycle gaits including single-support heel-off require higher energy input as compared with gaits excluding such an event, single-support heel-off significantly improves the energy efficiency of bipedal walking since the increase in the step length dominates the increase in the energy input.

DYNAMIC ROLL-AND-RISE MOTION BY AN ADULT-SIZE HUMANOID ROBOT

Whole-body dynamic actions under various contacts with the environment will be very important for future humanoid robots to support human tasks in unstructured environments. Such skills are very difficult to realize using the standard motion control methodology based on asymptotic convergence to the successive desired states. An alternative approach would be to exploit the passive dynamics of the body under constrained motion, and to navigate through multiple dynamics by imposing the least control in order to robustly reach the goal state. As a first example of such a strategy, we propose and investigate a "Roll-and-Rise" motion. This is a fully dynamic whole-body task including underactuated motion whose state trajectory is insoluble, and unpredictable perturbations due to complex contacts with the ground. First, we analyze the global structure of Roll-and-Rise motion. Then the critical points are analyzed using simplified models and simulations. The results suggest a non-uniform control strategy which focuses on sparse critical points in the global phase space, and allows deviations and trade-offs at other parts. Finally, experiments with a real adult-size humanoid robot are successfully carried out. The robot rose from a flat-lying posture to a crouching posture within 2 seconds.

AN INTEGRATED COMMUNICATIVE ROBOT — BUGNOID

A communicative robot — BUGNOID — which integrates various sensory data and behavior modules is introduced with some experimental results. To achieve flexible communication with humans, the robot has a multi-modal interface with diverse channels of communication. Moreover, the robot can create an environmental map and recognize its environment taking human behavior into account with the aim of co-existing with humans.

CREATING A NEW SERVICE ON THE WEB

Service functions are major component of every industry. The evolution of service functions have seen manually intensive tasks being replaced by a combination of mental and interactive tasks. As a part of this transformation, we have seen an increasing dependency on the high technology, actually information technology, mostly with computer-communications and the web. This high technology will finally replace the service functions by a combination of knowledge intensive, interactive and customer's individual tasks in the future. However, these knowledge intensive, interactive and customer's individual service functions could be enjoyable for the restricted person, due to the difficulties of the man (customers)-machine (PCs, web-server machines) interface and also the service providers are not able to obtain much more customer's individual and abstruse information for providing the customer's individual services, due to the customers' privacy problem. In this paper we focus on of knowledge intensive, interactive and customer's individual services in the future. We emphasize the importance of developing the mechanism of humanization for making these services enjoyable for anyone and the personalization for enjoyable the more individual services, and show some examples for these mechanisms in which humanization is realized by humanoid robots and personalization is realized by customers' privacy preserving scheme. We present a feedback system including the mechanism for humanization and personalization. By performing this feedback system, anyone who is not familiar to machines, can interact with machines like human-beings and can poll or report even though privacy related information anonymously to service providers. By periodically performing this feedback system, the customers' knowledge, information, suggestions and ideas can could be accumulated and the service providers could provide more individual services to customers, Once humanization and personalization mechanism are developed, by performing our feedback systems, we enhance customers' convenience and reduce the incidence of operation errors and thereby improve their productivity and quality of their life.

Motion Overlap for a Mobile Robot to Express its Mind

This paper discusses how a mobile robot may express itself to get help from users in a cooperative task. We focus on a situation in which a robot expresses its state of mind to get a user to lend it help. The design we propose, calledmotion overlap(MO), enables a robot to express human-like behavior in communicating with others. We reasoned that human-like behavior in a robot could help the user to understand its state of mind. We designed a small sweeping robot based on MO that conductsback and forth movement, and compared its MO expression in experiments with other nonverbal communication, i.e., buzzers and blinking LEDs. We found that the MO expression encouraged most users to help the robot. Differences among results obtained for the three types of expression were statistically significant, and results demonstrate that MO has potential in the design of robots for the home.