Humanoid Robot

The paper Humanoid Robots: A New Kind of Tool is about the humanoid robots.[1] It explains that the humanoid robots are designed to behave and interact in an environment like a human-being. It should be a task-based robot, which means it executes a specific task in humans life. Humanoid robots are interactive with people, hence they can have a conversation with people. They should give feedback and be able to recognize verbal commands. Therefore, it is important that the robot recognizes things such as: tone of the voice, the pitch, etc. A universal humanoid robot should also be able to recognize multiple languages. Humanoid robots also have the ability to react to people and read their emotions. They can read it when a person is nodding, smiling or looking scared. Besides a verbal interaction, the robot should also be emotionally interacting with people. For example, getting confused when someone is doing something too fast to follow. However, the emotion reactions are the most difficult to implement. Compared to industrial robots, humanoid robots are more independent and do not need human control. They can adapt to the surrounding environment.

The paper Development and evaluation of interactive humanoid robots is about an implemented humanoid robot and discussing its hardware and software. As we already have discussed the software of a humanoid robot in the previous paper, we are focusing now on the hardware of the humanoid robot. The size of a humanoid robot is important as it should not be too short or too long for humans, hence they designed a 120 cm tall robot. The diameter is 40 cm and weights 40 kg. It has a human-like appearance, as it has two arms, a head, two eyes, and a mobile platform with 2 driving wheels and 1 free wheel. It also has various sensors for vision, touch and audition. Moreover, it has sensors for detecting the obstacles: ten tactile sensors around the mobile platform and 24 ultrasonic sensors.  It also has skin sensors for interactive behaviors and two microphones s to listen to human voices. As for stereo vision and gazing control, its eyes have a pan–tilt mechanism with direct-drive motors. Its battery lasts for 4 hours and can be charged at a charging station.

References:

[1]Adams, B. et al. (no date) “Humanoid robots: A new kind of tool,” PsycEXTRA Dataset [Preprint]. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1037/e448722006-001.

[2]Kanda, T. et al. (2004) “Development and evaluation of Interactive Humanoid Robots,” Proceedings of the IEEE, 92(11), pp. 1839–1850. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1109/jproc.2004.835359.