18 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…
Inertial parameters should be estimated accurately for precise robot control and simulation. <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Exciting motions</i>, motions that sufficiently excite all robot dynamics, must be generated to obtain these
Flexible tools such as golf clubs and sports prostheses used for exercise are generally constructed from materials that are both strong and lightweight enough to withstand the weight and speed of human movement. The authors have previously proposed a hybrid-link system that integrates a rigid-link s
Dynamic simulation of soft and flexible bodies is important for the motion planning and control of soft robot systems. This study presents a fast real-time simulation of the piecewise constant strain (PCS) model proposed in soft robotics research to calculate the dynamics of a beam or rod structure.
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…
This study introduces a novel approach to Humanoid Robot Motion Generation using Functional Principal Component Analysis (FPCA) within the framework of Direct Optimal Control (DOC). FPCA efficiently compresses high-dimensional motion data, including ground reaction forces, into a low-dimensional spa
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
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…
The majority of humanoid robots adopt flat feet, a choice that can limit their performance when maneuvering over uneven terrains. Recently, a soft robotic foot designed to adapt to the ground was proposed to overcome part of these limitations. This paper presents the results of testing two such feet
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
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…
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…