Developing New Abilities for Humanoid Robots with a Wearable Interface

Abstract

A humanoid robot is a robot that has a similar appearance with humans. Although appearance is the one of the important features of humanoid robots, human-like behaviors and task solving abilities are more meaningful features in daily life. To make humanoid robots more useful, they should have the capacity to learn new abilities. However, today’s humanoid robots are not smart enough to adapt to their working environments. In this paper, we propose a method to develop new abilities of humanoid robots on the basis of imitation, one of the most powerful methods to learn a new skill, not only for humans but also for humanoid robots. To achieve this goal, we designed and implemented a wearable interface to teach humanoid robots via user demonstration. Magnetic markers and flex sensors are applied for capturing human motion. A head mount display and a microphone are used for communicating with the partner robot. A vision channel and speech channel are employed to communicate with the partner robot. The wearable system assists the user and enhances interaction with the robot through an intuitive motion imitating method and multimodal communication channels via which commands are given and sensory feedback is received. A vision channel is used to complement the weakness in recognizing surrounding states. A human teacher can sense the environment by sharing the robot’s sight using the head mount display and he or she can decide the most appropriate behavior for the observed situation. When the teacher concludes that there is no proper behavior among the robot’s abilities, a new ability can be trained through demonstration by the teacher. We conducted a kinematic analysis on both a human user and a partner robot to overcome the joint difference problem when transferring motion from the human user to the robot. We used the humanoid robot AMIO as a test bed to validate the wearable interface and found that we could make the robot more intelligent with the wearable interface.