Video: Robot moves like a senior citizen

Today’s humanoid robots are able to run, somersault and even dance – now comes a robot that walks like a senior citizen. It leans on objects in its environment for support to help it move around and complete tasks.

Robots, and more importantly roboticists, are looking at objects in the wrong way, thinks Sébastien Lengagne of Japan’s National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology in Tsukuba. “Roboticists usually just see objects as obstacles to be avoided,” he says “But they can help us.”

Lengagne and his colleagues are developing a system to allow humanoid robots to use their entire bodies, and any surrounding objects, to help them move around cluttered environments and complete complex balancing tasks without getting stuck or falling over.

“If I ask you to look below your desktop, you will put your hand on the desktop for support,” he says. “But most methods will try to get the robot to do the task without touching the desktop.”


The team’s robot, HRP-2, acts more like a human. It will place both arms on a table to maintain its balance when trying to sit down in a chair, or use one arm for support when taking a big swinging kick at a ball.

Sidlebot

The system breaks down tasks into two stages. In the first stage, software developed by Lengagne’s colleague Karim Bouyarmane identifies objects in the robot’s surroundings that it can use to help complete a task – for instance, leaning on a table with its forearms to sidle past it and into a nearby chair. The software then calculates a number of poses that the robot could strike to make best use of the table for stability while it shuffles towards the chair and sits on it. Lengagne’s software then converts these static poses into one smooth motion, taking into account the forces operating on the robot in each position to ensure it does not lose balance.

At present, the system has to run these calculations on an external computer, but the team hope that ultimately a robot’s onboard computer will be able to carry out the process in one step.

The work was presented earlier this month at the Humanoids 2010 conference in Nashville, Tennessee.