[abstFig src='/00280006/03.jpg' width='300' text='Robotic foot adaptable to rough terrain' ] Practical ambulation must be realized by walking robots to enable social and industrial support by walking robots in human living environments. A four-legged robot that walks through rough terrain effectively does not erase the fact that most legged robots – particularly biped robots – have difficulty negotiating rough terrain. We focus below on a foot structure and landing control for enabling any type of legged robot to walk through rough terrain. When a walking robot lands on the ground, it is difficult to detect the detailed geometry and dynamic properties of the ground surface. The new foot structure we propose adapts to ground surfaces that have different geometries and hardness. The foot has four-part flat soles. The landing controller we apply to a robot with our proposed foot structure increases the stability of contact with the ground. We verify the effectiveness of our proposed foot structure in experiments.
Several extant studies examine the design of power assist systems that support leg motion of the wearer. However, in most cases, actuators are always required to support the upper body weight of a wearer. This support reduces power efficiency, and thus, a new mechanism is required to effectively support upper body weight. This paper proposes a design of a lower limb load reduction device that uses a pantograph mechanism. In the mechanism, leg motion can be separated into horizontal and vertical motions, and only the lower limb load that is caused by vertical motion and the wearer’s own weight is compensated by the actuators. Additionally, the design enables support of upper body weight only in the support leg phase, and actuators are not used in the lifted leg phase. The design principle is described, and experimental results subsequently demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed design.
This paper describes a robot-mediated information guide system that introduces audio-visual information to users interactively. The developed information guide system is composed of a touch panel interface, a mediator robot and backyard control systems. The touch panel interface functions to display audio-visual contents, while the mediator robot attracts people to this guide system and help user's operation. Many robots in literature are equipped with interactive audio-visual interface, however in most cases the audio-visual interface is a front end of the robot for presentation. We propose a new communication framework in which the robot behaves as a mediator to make a bridge between users and audio-visual interface by generating speeches and gestures. We hypothesize that entrainment of the mediator robot with users and contents could promote user's immersion in the contents. We conducted experiments with the proposed information guide system to examine the effect of robot mediation in a realistic interaction scenario that actually guides city sites for visitors. The developed information guide system was demonstrated in the science museum of the city in May 2014 and will be used for public events in future.
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