2. Outline
1. Introduction
Overview about Humanoid Robots
History
2. Main part
Scientific research
Locomotion
Kismet (robot)
3.Conclusion
Opinion
3. Overview
• Hirokazu Kato, a professor at Waseda University in
Tokyo built Wabot-1
– Could walk, grasp and talk.
• The Wabot-2 was built in 1984
– Could sit on a piano bench, read the music placed
on the music stand above the keyboard with its
head (a TV camera) and play the piece of music.
• By the mid 1990s many humanoid projects are under
way most notably in Japan, Germany and U.S.
• Humanoid Robotics Social Interaction reprogrammable self-
contained multifunctional movable mechanical artificial agent.
4. Humanoid Researching
• To study walking gait of human beings.
• To build teleoperated robot to directly take place
of human.
• To build robots that can perform everyday work.
• To investigate hand-eye coordination for tasks
usually done by people.
• To entertain.
• To study how people do what they do in the
world.
Current Humanoid Researching
• Locomotion and motor control: bipedal walking control and control
of systems with many degrees of freedom and many sensors.
• Artificial Intelligence : Robot Intelligence, Human Computer
Interaction.
5. Locomotion
• A stable bipedal walking is difficult to achieve.
• The main approaches taken are
– Model-based
– ZMP based (used in Honda & sony robots)
– Biologically inspired
– Learning
• Honda ASIMO
– 26 degree of freedom
– Walk independently, even climb stairs
• Sony QRIO
– Can dance, run even surf
6. Kismet (MIT)
Kismet is an expressive robotic creature with perceptual and motor
modalities tailored to natural human communication channels
• 1990s at Massachusetts Institute of Technology by Dr. Cynthia Breazeal
• MIT AI lab adopted behavior-based approach and developed Cog and
Kismet to study how social cues can be elicited from people by robots.
• Kismet is an active vision head with a neck and facial features.
• It has four camera: two in the steerable eyes and two wide angle ones
embedded in the face.
• Also has active eyebrows, ears, lips and a jaw.
• Altogether it has 17 motors.
• Cost of physical materials was an estimated US $25,000.
• There are four Motorola 68332s, nine 400 MHz PCs, and another
500 MHz PC.
8. Controlling of Kismet
• Vision System: consists of four color CCD, two camera (0.25
inch), lipstick cameras (2.2 mm)
• Auditory System: auditory signal (500 MHz PC running
Linux)
• Vocalization System ( underlying software (DECtalk v4.5)
9. Kismet (cont.)
• Has capabilities : saccades and smooth pursuit like human.
• Can detect human faces, estimate gaze direction of a person
and understand what a person paying attention to.
• Express its internal emotional state through facial expression
and prosody in its voice.
• Can able to detect basic prosody in the voices of people and
classify their speech as “praising”, “prohibiting”, “bidding for
attention” or “soothing”.
• Kismet’s perception and control systems runs on more than a
dozen computers.
12. References
• Rodney Brooks, Humanoid Robots, Communications of the ACM, Vol. 45, No. 3
(March 2002). Available at: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/504729.504751
• Humanoid Robotics Group, http://www.ai.mit.edu/projects/humanoid-robotics-
group/.
• R. Brooks, C. Breazeal, M. Marjanovic, and B. Scassellati, “The Cog project:
Building a humanoid robot,” Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 1562, pp.
52–87, 1999.
• Robocup, http://www.robocup.org/
• Manuela Veloso, Entertainment Robotics, Communications of the ACM, Vol. 45,
No. 3 (March 2002). Available at: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/504729.504755
• http://www.sony.net/SonyInfo/QRIO/top_nf.html
• http://asimo.honda.com/
