35 accepted papers
Visual foundation models have achieved remarkable progress in scale and versatility, yet understanding the 3D world remains a fundamental challenge. While 2D images contain cues about 3D structure that humans readily interpret, deep models often fail to exploit them, underperforming on tasks such as…
Open-Vocabulary Segmentation (OVS) methods are capable of performing semantic segmentation without relying on a fixed vocabulary, and in some cases, without training or fine-tuning. However, OVS methods typically require a human in the loop to specify the vocabulary based on the task or dataset at h…
With the background of research on materials laboratory automation, this study aims to construct an automation system for measuring dielectric property, which is an electrical property of materials. The automation system is composed of the combination of a manipulation by a force-sensing robot and a…
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
The capabilities of natural language models trained on large-scale data have increased immensely over the past few years. Open source libraries such as HuggingFace have made these models easily available and accessible. While prior research has identified biases in large language models, this paper…
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…
In video transformers, the time dimension is often treated in the same way as the two spatial dimensions. However, in a scene where objects or the camera may move, a physical point imaged at one location in frame $t$ may be entirely unrelated to what is found at that location in frame $t+k$. These t…
Self-healing function is a promising approach for damage management of high-load robot applications such as legged robots. Although the function is getting major in soft robotics, its application to life-sized "stiff" robots is of relatively minor interest. Although the authors have devised several…
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
The dominant paradigm for learning video-text representations – noise contrastive learning – increases the similarity of the representations of pairs of samples that are known to be related, such as text and video from the same sample, and pushes away the representations of all other pairs. We posit…
The musculoskeletal humanoid has various biomimetic benefits, and it is important that we can embed and evaluate human reflexes in the actual robot. Although stretch reflex has been implemented in lower limbs of musculoskeletal humanoids, we apply it to the upper limb to discover its useful applicat…
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…
The estimation and management of motor temperature are important for the continuous movements of robots. In this study, we propose an online learning method of thermal model parameters of motors for an accurate estimation of motor core temperature. Also, we propose a management method of motor core
The musculoskeletal humanoid has various biomimetic benefits, and the redundant muscle arrangement is one of its most important characteristics. This redundancy can achieve fail-safe redundant actuation and variable stiffness control. However, there is a problem that the maximum joint angle velocity…
A large part of the current success of deep learning lies in the effectiveness of data -- more precisely: of labeled data. Yet, labelling a dataset with human annotation continues to carry high costs, especially for videos. While in the image domain, recent methods have allowed to generate meaningfu…
It is necessary to use not only foot but also hand, knee and other body parts to support body weight for locomotion in uneven terrain. Such multi-contact motion planning is an important research topic including lots of previous works; however, a problem of computational speed of planning is still re…
While the musculoskeletal humanoid has various biomimetic benefits, the modeling of its complex structure is difficult, and many learning-based systems have been developed so far. There are various methods, such as control methods using acquired relationships between joints and muscles represented b
The flexible musculoskeletal hand is difficult to modelize, and its model can change constantly due to deterioration over time, irreproducibility of initialization, etc. Also, for object recognition, contact detection, and contact control using the hand, it is desirable not to use a neural network t
The flexible under-actuated musculoskeletal hand is superior in its adaptability and impact resistance. On the other hand, since the relationship between sensors and actuators cannot be uniquely determined, almost all its controls are based on feedforward controls. When grasping and using a tool, th…
Self-healing robotics has been of considerable interest. We believe the function will have a major role in legged robots as a typical high-load application of robotics. Some pioneering works have been ongoing on self-healing soft robots. However, the development of large load self-healing component…
To develop Musashi as a musculoskeletal humanoid platform to investigate learning control systems, we aimed for a body with flexible musculoskeletal structure, redundant sensors, and easily reconfigurable structure. For this purpose, we develop joint modules that can directly measure joint angles, m…
To realize a robust automobile driving behavior of musculoskeletal tendon-driven humanoids, we developed a six-axis force measurement module with a core-shell structure. This sensor enables space saving, high load capacity and wholebody sensing at the same time. By developing a foot unit incorporati…
The tendon-driven musculoskeletal humanoid has many benefits that human beings have, but the modeling of its complex muscle and bone structures is difficult and conventional model-based controls cannot realize intended movements. Therefore, a learning control mechanism that acquires nonlinear relati
The musculoskeletal humanoid has many benefits that human beings have, but the modeling of its complex flexible body is difficult. Although we have developed an online acquisition method of the nonlinear relationship between joints and muscles, we could not completely match the actual robot and its…
Human hands can not only grasp objects of various shape and size and manipulate them in hands but also exert such a large gripping force that they can support the body in the situations such as dangling a bar and climbing a ladder. On the other hand, it is difficult for most robot hands to manage bo…
The body structures of tendon-driven musculoskeletal humanoids are complex, and accurate modeling is difficult, because they are made by imitating the body structures of human beings. For this reason, we have not been able to move them accurately like ordinary humanoids driven by actuators in each a
Tendon-driven musculoskeletal humanoids have many benefits in terms of the flexible spine, multiple degrees of freedom, and variable stiffness. At the same time, because of its body complexity, there are problems in controllability. First, due to the large difference between the actual robot and its…
The body structure of an anatomically correct tendon-driven musculoskeletal humanoid is complex, and the difference between its geometric model and the actual robot is very large because expressing the complex routes of tendon wires in a geometric model is very difficult. If we move a tendon-driven
Human can not only support their body during standing or walking, but also support them by hand, so that they can dangle a bar and others. But most humanoid robots support their body only in the foot and they use their hand just to manipulate objects because their hands are too weak to support their…
The human forearm is composed of two long, thin bones called the radius and the ulna, and rotates using two axle joints. We aimed to develop a forearm based on the body proportion, weight ratio, muscle arrangement, and joint performance of the human body in order to bring out its benefits. For this,…
We propose a human mimetic foot structure for musculoskeletal humanoids. We designed the foot structure by inspiring from human foot abilities of the multi-bone connected structure for flexibility and the distributed force sensor system. The foot has multi-DOFs structure including toe DOF that is co…
In this paper we propose a novel method to utilize the skeletal structure not only for supporting force but for releasing heat by latent heat.
We propose a sensor-driver integrated muscle module by integrating necessarily components for tendon-driven robot which is likely to complicate. The module has abilities of high-tension measurability and flexible tension control. In order to achieve flexible tension control, we developed the new ten…
The main goal of this paper is to design and evaluate a spine structure which withstands various motions. The structure around the neck has a prevailing importance since it is involved in various motions of the upper half of the body. The new design method we introduce essentially shows how to desig…