Generating Performance Motions of Humanoid Robot for Entertainment

Abstract

This paper presents the development of generating dance performances of humanoid robot, HSR (HanSaRam) -VII, synchronized with Robonova, for entertainment. This heterogeneous team, RoboBees, participated in 'Robots at Play Award 2006' and nominated as one of top six teams in the world. A method of generating and combining both periodic motion (on-line pattern generator) and aperiodic motion (off-line pattern generator) is investigated along with the control architecture for HSR-VII. Detailed system descriptions of two types of humanoid robots, HSR-VII from KAIST and Robonova from miniROBOT Corp., are included with the experimental results. In addition, the time domain passivity compliance control system is introduced to guarantee the stable periodic motion by changing the initial planned trajectories. Video clip of RoboBees' performance is available at http://rit.kaist.ac.kr.

A common interface for humanoid simulation and hardware

“…Similarly, the displacement in the Z direction is given by (2), where Z is the actual distance in the z-axis from the top of the head to the harness base. This feedback, along with a simple PID controller, causes the harness to follow the head at a safe distance.…”

“…A popular method, the Zero Moment Point (ZMP)-based algorithms used for these robots has a simplified model of the humanoid body, bypassing many of the scaling issues identified. In the simple point-mass, inverted pendulum model used in [2], the only parameters are the overall robot mass, and the height of the center of gravity. Scaling this algorithm is very direct because of its simplicity, but it does require tuning to compensate for the simplifying assumptions.…”

“…For the last few years, the state of the art in humanoid research has been full-size humanoids such as Honda's ASIMO [1], KAIST's Hubo [2], and the HRP-2 [3]. These robots are capable of subtle, sophisticated motions that, in many cases, equals the dexterity of humans.…”