13 accepted papers
Reliable object localization is a critical challenge in drone-based aerial manipulation, particularly when objects are outside the camera's field of view. This paper presents a new approach to enhance drone reliability in aerial grasping tasks by integrating a 1D time-of-flight range sensor with a v
One of the important advantages of musculoskeletal humanoids is that the muscle arrangement can be easily changed and the number of muscles can be increased according to the situation. In this study, we describe an overall system of muscle addition for musculoskeletal humanoids and the adaptive body
Soft robots are made of compliant materials and perform tasks that are challenging for rigid robots. However, their continuum nature makes it difficult to develop model-based control strategies. This work presents a robust model-based control scheme for soft continuum robots. Our dynamic model is ba…
For robots to move in the real world, they must first correctly understand the state of its own body and the tools that it holds. In this research, we propose DIJE, an algorithm to estimate the image Jacobian for every pixel. It is based on an optical flow calculation and a simplified Kalman Filter…
There is a way to utilize humanoid robots to mimic human behavior by taking advantage of their human-like proportions. In general, motion capture is used; in this case, the posture of the body links can be taken. However, this method does not provide detailed information on the contact state, which…
The musculoskeletal humanoid is difficult to modelize due to the flexibility and redundancy of its body, whose state can change over time, and so balance control of its legs is challenging. There are some cases where ordinary PID controls may cause instability. In this study, to solve these problems…
Legged robots with high locomotive performance have been extensively studied, and various leg structures have been proposed. Especially, a leg structure that can achieve both continuous and high jumps is advantageous for moving around in a three-dimensional environment. In this study, we propose a p…
For a robot with redundant sensors and actuators distributed throughout its body, it is difficult to construct a controller or a neural network using all of them due to computational cost and complexity. Therefore, it is effective to extract functionally related sensors and actuators, group them, an
We have implemented a force-based operational space controller on a physical musculoskeletal humanoid robot arm. The controller calculates muscle activations based on a biomimetic Hill-type muscle model. We propose a method to include the joint torque nullspace in the optimization process, which ena…
Musculoskeletal humanoids have various biomimetic advantages, and the redundant muscle arrangement allowing for variable stiffness control is one of the most important. In this study, we focus on one feature of the redundancy, which enables the humanoid to keep moving even if one of its muscles brea…
We proposed a method for learning the actual body image of a musculoskeletal humanoid for posture generation and object manipulation using inverse kinematics with redundancy in the shoulder complex. The effectiveness of this method was confirmed by realizing automobile steering wheel operation. The
Due to their inherent compliance, soft robots are more versatile than rigid linked robots when they interact with their environment, such as object manipulation or biomimetic motion, and are considered to be the key element in introducing robots to everyday environments. Although various soft roboti…
In this research, we have taken a biomimetic approach to the control of musculoskeletal humanoids. A controller was designed based on the motor directional tuning phenomenon seen in the motor cortex of primates. Despite the simple implementation of the control scheme, complex coordinated movements s…