20 accepted papers
Robotic systems with redundant degrees of freedom can achieve the same task outcome using multiple configurations, resulting in solution sets that form manifolds in the configuration space. Existing approaches typically exploit such redundancy locally through Jacobian-based techniques to compute ind…
Manipulation with whole-body contact by humanoid robots offers distinct advantages, including enhanced stability and reduced load. On the other hand, we need to address challenges such as the increased computational cost of motion generation and the difficulty of measuring broad-area contact. We the
This paper presents a novel method for detecting and estimating contact forces only from human motions using machine learning techniques. Knowing the location of the contacts with the environment and the magnitude of the exerted force is critical for dynamic human motion analysis. However, their ann…
To enable humanoid robots to work robustly in confined environments, multi-contact motion that makes contacts not only at extremities, such as hands and feet, but also at intermediate areas of the limbs, such as knees and elbows, is essential. We develop a method to realize such whole-body multi-con
In this letter, we present a planning method considering regrasp and mobility for the manipulation problem of a long deformable object in an industrial scenario. The object is carried through designated rollers by a dual-arm robot in the presence of environmental constraints. The problem is formulat
Recently, fast and practical inverse kinematics (IK) methods for complicated human models have gained considerable interest owing to the spread of convenient motion-capture or human-augmentation technologies. Although the IK algorithms developed in robotics can also be applied to humans, they experi
The advancement and development of human modeling have greatly benefited from principles used in robotics, for instance, multibody dynamics laid the foundations for physics engines of human movement simulation, and the robotics and control theory were used to contextualize human sensorimotor control
We address the problem of calculating complex Jacobian matrices that can arise from optimization problems. An example is the inverse optimal control in human motion analysis which has a cost function that depends on the second order time-derivative of torque ̈τ. Thus; its gradient decomposed to; amo…
In future robotic applications in environments such as nursing houses, construction sites, private homes, etc, robots might need to take unpredicted physical actions according to the state of the users to overcome possible human errors. Referring to these actions as active physical human-robot inter
Instead of human subjects, humanoid robots can be used as human dummies to test the human-designed products. We propose a controller that uses wearable assistive devices (also referred to as exoskeletons) to reproduce human movement in the evaluation. The proposed control scheme consists two compone
Deformable objects are very common around us in our daily life. Because they have infinitely many degrees of freedom, they present a challenging problem in robotics. Inspired by practical industrial applications, we present in this paper our research on using a humanoid robot to take a long, thin an…
This paper presents an inverse kinematics (IK) method which can control future velocities and accelerations for multi-body systems. The proposed IK method is formulated as a quadratic programing (QP) that optimizes future joint trajectories. The features of the proposed IK are: (1) the evaluation of…
The paper aims to develop a methodology of transferring the knowledge obtained from the experiments of laboratory animals to human musculoskeletal system. To achieve the goal, we propose a method for estimating the homologous posture of the mammalian skeletal system corresponding to the human body p…
Motor functions of the biological system has been forged through 4 billion years evolution. From a neurorobotics view, it is important not only to know how well it works, but also how it fails. To quantitatively describe early onset symptoms of a neurodegenerative disease, we analyzed phenotypes of…
A motion planning algorithm computes the motion of a robot by computing a path through its configuration space. To improve the runtime of motion planning algorithms, we propose to nest robots in each other, creating a nested quotient-space decomposition of the configuration space. Based on this deco…
Wearable robots for lumbar support (hereafter, WRLS) can reduce the users' lumbar stress and the risk of their back injuries. Although several products have already been put on the market, consumers and distributors have difficulty comparing their performance during assistance because they are curre
This paper presents a novel unified theoretical framework for differential kinematics and dynamics for complex robot motion optimization. By introducing 18 times 18 comprehensive motion transformation matrix (CMTM), forward differential kinematics and dynamics including velocity and acceleration can…
This paper presents a novel optimization method for generating persistently exciting trajectories for inertial parameters identification of a robot. The exciting performance of the trajectories is usually evaluated by the condition number of the regressor matrix, which appears in the linear regressi…
The mass parameters of robots influence performances of model-based control and validation of the simulation results. The mass parameters provided by CAD data are usually rough approximation of the true parameters. Therefore several methods for estimation of those parameters have been proposed. Thei…
This paper presents the method to retarget human motion. The method can evaluate the ability of the preservation of the original characteristics of human motion data. It enables to compute the joint trajectories of the human corresponding with the retargeted ones of the robot at the same time, by ut…