GetRobo Blog English

A New Way to Make Humanoids Walk - Work in Progress

 Tomomichi Sugihara  of Kyushu University is an expert on humanoid robots. His works include the H series  (H5, H6 and H7) and the UT-mu series. He provided the software for isamu, UT-theta and UT-gamma. He is one of the Superstars.

 

(Photo: Dr. Sugihara with one of his creations - a pale pink robot named "mighty")

 So it may come as a surprise for some people when he says that "humanoids of the future will NOT be based on current technology." During the history of humanoid research, he says, "we've accumulated lots of know-how on building the robots supported by advances in mechatronic technologies." "But there hasn't been much progress in the theoretics of how we control them and make them walk autonomously."

 But what about the ASIMO? 

 "ASIMO and most of the other humanoids are based on trajectory planning and when something goes wrong - such as an unexpected obstacle showing up - they have to correct their paths. The greatness of ASIMO is how well it can adjust. But there is always going to be limits when you have a preset trajectory. So we as roboticists have to gather up our courage to move back to square one and come up with a completely new method."

 Dr. Sugihara has ideas. He has named his new controlling method "Dynamics Morphing." Details will be described in his upcoming paper. 

 His goal?  "To develop a general-purpose humanoid tool. Versatile enough so that users can decide how to use them - just like the PC."

Robot House for Lease

 Anybody want to test their future home robot product inside a robot-ready house? Well, come to Fukuoka City in south of Japan and you can lease a model house - basically for free. The 1,700 square feet house and surrounding area is set up with cameras, LIDARS and thousands of RFID tags.

      

 Just contact Prof. Tsutomu Hasegawa of  Kyushu University, who is the leader of the project that led to the development of this house. "No matter how sophisticated the robots become, it is impossible for them to be of any use to us if the environment didn't support them," says Prof. Hasegawa. If you want the robots to be autonomous, they need to know where they stand and where the humans and other objects are so that they can perform whatever task they are supposed to do.  

 In the past 2 years, Prof. Hasegawa's team has demonstrated a robotic wheel chair that carries a person from the house to a nearby bus stop. Also, together with Yaskawa Electric they showed SmartPal and a smaller companion robot work together inside the house. 

 The core software that supports this environment is called "TMS" which stands for "Town Management System." TMS is open source and you can use it in your own environment with your own sensors, meaning you don't have to fly all the way to Fukuoka to do your experiments. The software will be downloadable soon. The site is not quite ready yet, but it will be similar to something like this.   

 If you do want to use the city-owned facility, researchers from overseas are welcome too, although I must warn you that there are no user manuals in languages other than Japanese. And you will have to pay your own electricity and phone bills. Prof. Hasegawa says that he and his team would be willing to offer technical support based upon a joint research agreement.

 What I thought was really cool when I visited Prof. Hasegawa in Feb. 2009 were the supporting team of robots that work in the background. Photographed below with Prof. Hasegawa are the 3 robots that move around the rooms and outdoors to develop a precise 3D map of the whole environment. Also there is a set of robots that go around the house and neighborhood periodically to check whether all the camera angles have remained where they are supposed to be. I feel symphathy for these hard-working robots that are essential but never seem to get any press because people just don't know they exist.

 

  Prof. Hasegawa's group is now working on applying TMS to a real world environment. One of the first places he would like TMS to be utilized is an elderly care facility. They will be looking into what the needs are and how robots would be able to help.

New Interface for Mobile Robots

Associate Professor Takafumi Matsumaru at the Bio-Robotics & Human-Mechatronics Lab at Shizuoka University has come up with a new way to control mobile robots. He is envisioning cases in which elderly people can use their walking sticks to guide their mobile companions or uses where manual input of commands are not possible. He calls it the "Step-On Interface (SOI)." A video is worth a thousand words.....

Dr. Matsumaru (shown left) spent 12 years at Toshiba developing robots before he joined the faculty at Shizuoka University.

Industrial Robot Giant Interested in Robots for Consumers

  Yaskawa Electric - one of the world's largest industrial robot manufacturers - is interested in developing and selling more robots outside of the factory floors. Recently it's MOTOMAN robots were found playing the traditional Japanese drums at a large summer festival in southern Japan (you can read about the drum beating robots on NewScientist.com) but the company has other projects under works.

  One is the Robo Porter. I had a chance to see it at Yaskawa's headquarters in Kitakyushu in the end of July and below is a video that I took then.

  Yaskawa is just about to start using the Robo Porters inside its own factory where they will carry around the circuit boards that are used to make other robots. But the sophisticated wheels provide easy turns and smooth rides and it should be fit for other mobile robots - such as wheelchairs and airport porters - says Kazuhiko Yokoyama, Manager of the RT Technology Team at Yaskawa's R&D Center.

  Another project at Yaskawa is the SmartPal. Yaskawa initially developed this robot to prove that it can manufacture a robot from interchangeable units. Yaskawa currently sells industrial robots as a "system," but it is thinking of starting to make money from selling "units" and "components" as well. This strategy is better for the consumer/service robot market because unlike industrial robots, "each robot will need to be highly customized and one company can't possibly make a product from ground up" according to Yokoyama.

  Consumer robot manufacturers will have to buy units to build a product for a ceratin need and that's where Yaskawa would like to do its business. In other words, Yaskawa would like to sell the units that it developed to make SmartPal so that its customers can use it in their products.

  Yokoyama (shown below with SmartPal) predicts that his company's unit/component business will eventually exceed its system business.

    

Creating Contents for the Future

I met Tomoaki Kasuga, founder and CEO of Speecys Corp., and he says that he is hoping to start developing applications and contents in the U.S. for their humanoid robot  MI・RAI-RT. (MIRAI means the FUTURE in Japanese.) Kasuga-san, who used to work on the AIBO at Sony before starting his company, wants MI・RAI to always be connected to the network and become a "new medium." Whereas the TV uses a screen to transmit information, the robot will use it's hands and legs. He's hoping to get new ideas for content by having developers not just in Japan but in the U.S. as well.