In the approximately century-long journey of robotics, humanoid robots made their debut around six decades ago. While current humanoids bear human-like appearances, none have embodied true humaneness, remaining distant from achieving human-like to human-level intelligence. The rapid recent advancements in generative AI and (multimodal) large language models have further reignited and escalated interest in humanoids towards real-time, interactive, and multimodal designs and applications, such as fostering humanoid workers, advisers, educators, medical professionals, caregivers, and receptionists. These unveil boundless opportunities of transforming 1) AI robotics into a research era of humanoid AI, and 2) AI robots into new-generation humanoid AI robots (AI humanoids). Our unique and comprehensive review of about 30 reported humanoids discloses a systematic terminology and a paradigmatic landscape of human-looking to human-like and human-level humanoids. It inspires comprehensive new perspectives and directions of humanoid AI as an area: transitioning from human-looking to humane humanoids, humanizing humanoids with functional and nonfunctional specifications, and cultivating technical and actionable advances of AI humanoids. Humanoid AI and AI humanoids nurture symbiotic advancements and future opportunities of synthesizing and transforming humanity modeling and conventional, generative to human-level AI into humanoid robotics.
The Cloud-based Advanced Robotics Laboratory (CARL) integrates a whole body controller and web-based teleoperation to enable any device with a web browser to access and control a humanoid robot. By integrating humanoid robots with the cloud, they are accessible from any Internet-connected device. Increased accessibility is important because few people have access to state-of-the-art humanoid robots limiting their rate of development. CARL's implementation is based on modern software libraries, frameworks, and middleware including Node.js, Socket.IO, ZMQ, ROS, Robot Web Tools, and ControlIt! Fe…
A common architecture for torque controlled humanoid robots consists in two nested loops. The outer loop generates desired joint/motor torques, and the inner loop stabilises these desired values. In doing so, the inner loop usually compensates for joint friction phenomena, thus removing their inherent stabilising property that may be also beneficial for high level control objectives. This paper shows how to exploit friction for joint and task space control of humanoid robots. Experiments are carried out using the humanoid robot iCub.
In this paper, a combination of ankle and hip strategy is used for push recovery of a position-controlled humanoid robot. Ankle strategy and hip strategy are equivalent to Center of Pressure (CoP) and Centroidal Moment Pivot (CMP) regulation respectively. For controlling the CMP and CoP we need a torque-controlled robot, however most of the conventional humanoid robots are position controlled. In this regard, we present an efficient way for implementation of the hip and ankle strategies on a position controlled humanoid robot. We employ a feedback controller to compensate the capture point err…
Our research explores the potential of a humanoid robot for work in unpredictable environments, but controlling a humanoid robot remains a very difficult problem. In our previous work, we designed a prototype virtual reality (VR) interface to allow an operator to command a humanoid robot. However, while usable, the initial interface was not sufficient for commanding the robot to perform the tasks; for example, in some cases, there was a lack of precision available for robot control. The interface was overly cumbersome in some areas as well. In this paper, we discuss numerous additions, inspire…
This position paper introduces the results of an initial card sorting experiment based on the reactions and questions of a group of children with autism working with a humanoid robot in a therapeutic laboratory on autonomy.
This paper describes the development of a humanoid robot called ARDOP. The goal of the project is to provide a modular, open-source, and inexpensive humanoid robot that would enable researchers to answer various problems related to robotic manipulation and perception. ARDOP primarily comprises of two functional units namely the perception and manipulation system, here we discuss the conceptualization and design methodology of these systems and proceed to present their performance results on simulation and various custom-designed experiments.
Forthcoming applications concerning humanoid robots may involve physical interaction between the robot and a dynamic environment. In such scenario, classical balancing and walking controllers that neglect the environment dynamics may not be sufficient for achieving a stable robot behavior. This paper presents a modeling and control framework for balancing humanoid robots in contact with a dynamic environment. We first model the robot and environment dynamics, together with the contact constraints. Then, a control strategy for stabilizing the full system is proposed. Theoretical results are ver…
Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia（意大利理工学院）；University of Genova（热那亚大学）；The University of Manchester（曼彻斯特大学）
Humanoid robot teleoperation allows humans to integrate their cognitive capabilities with the apparatus to perform tasks that need high strength, manoeuvrability and dexterity. This paper presents a framework for teleoperation of humanoid robots using a novel approach for motion retargeting through inverse kinematics over the robot model. The proposed method enhances scalability for retargeting, i.e., it allows teleoperating different robots by different human users with minimal changes to the proposed system. Our framework enables an intuitive and natural interaction between the human operato…
Most humanoid robots have highly complicated structure and design of robots that are very similar to human is extremely difficult. In this paper, modelling of a general and comprehensive algorithm for control of humanoid robots is presented using Colored Petri Nets. For keeping dynamic balance of the robot, combination of Gyroscope and Accelerometer sensors are used in algorithm. Image processing is used to identify two fundamental issues: first, detection of target or an object which robot must follow; second, detecting surface of the ground so that walking robot could maintain its balance ju…
Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia（意大利理工学院）；Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition（佛罗里达人机认知研究所）；University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）；National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST)（日本产业技术综合研究所）；Inria（法国国家信息与自动化研究所）；Université de Lorraine（洛林大学）；CNRS（法国国家科学研究中心）；Tokyo University of Science（东京理科大学）
Teleoperation of humanoid robots enables the integration of the cognitive skills and domain expertise of humans with the physical capabilities of humanoid robots. The operational versatility of humanoid robots makes them the ideal platform for a wide range of applications when teleoperating in a remote environment. However, the complexity of humanoid robots imposes challenges for teleoperation, particularly in unstructured dynamic environments with limited communication. Many advancements have been achieved in the last decades in this area, but a comprehensive overview is still missing. This s…
Planning balanced and collision-free motion for humanoid robots is non-trivial, especially when they are operated in complex environments, such as reaching targets behind obstacles or through narrow passages. We propose a method that allows us to apply existing sampling--based algorithms to plan trajectories for humanoids by utilizing a customized state space representation, biased sampling strategies, and a steering function based on a robust inverse kinematics solver. Our approach requires no prior offline computation, thus one can easily transfer the work to new robot platforms. We tested t…
Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia（意大利理工学院）；The University of Manchester（曼彻斯特大学）
When a human and a humanoid robot collaborate physically, ergonomics is a key factor to consider. Assuming a given humanoid robot, several control architectures exist nowadays to address ergonomic physical human-robot collaboration. This paper takes one step further by considering robot hardware parameters as optimization variables in the problem of collaborative payload lifting. The variables that parametrize robot's kinematics and dynamics ensure their physical consistency, and the human model is considered in the optimization problem. By leveraging the proposed modelling framework, the ergo…
The use of standard robotic platforms can accelerate research and lower the entry barrier for new research groups. There exist many affordable humanoid standard platforms in the lower size ranges of up to 60cm, but larger humanoid robots quickly become less affordable and more difficult to operate, maintain and modify. The igus Humanoid Open Platform is a new and affordable, fully open-source humanoid platform. At 92cm in height, the robot is capable of interacting in an environment meant for humans, and is equipped with enough sensors, actuators and computing power to support researchers in m…
DFKI GmbH（德国人工智能研究中心）；University of Edinburgh（爱丁堡大学）；Alan Turing Institute（艾伦·图灵研究所）；LAAS-CNRS（法国国家科学研究中心系统分析与架构实验室）
Last decades of humanoid research has shown that humanoids developed for high dynamic performance require a stiff structure and optimal distribution of mass--inertial properties. Humanoid robots built with a purely tree type architecture tend to be bulky and usually suffer from velocity and force/torque limitations. This paper presents a novel series-parallel hybrid humanoid called RH5 which is 2 m tall and weighs only 62.5 kg capable of performing heavy-duty dynamic tasks with 5 kg payloads in each hand. The analysis and control of this humanoid is performed with whole-body trajectory optimiz…
National Institute of Applied Sciences and Technology（国家应用科学与技术学院）
In this paper, the dynamic modeling of a seven linked humanoid robot, is accurately developed, in the three dimensional space using the Newton-Euler formalism. The aim of this study is to provide a clear and a systematic approach so that starting from generalized motion equations of all rigid bodies of the humanoid robot one can establish a reduced dynamical model. The resulting model can be expended either for simulation propositions or implemented for any given control law. In addition, transformations and developments, proposed here, can be exploited for modeling any other three-dimensional…
Artificial and Mechanical Intelligence, Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia（人工智能与机械智能，意大利技术研究院）；School of Computer Science, University of Manchester（计算机科学学院，曼彻斯特大学）；Department of Industrial Engineering, University of Naples Federico II（工业工程系，那不勒斯费德里克二世大学）
Institute for Media Innovation, Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学媒体创新研究所）；MIRALab, University of Geneva（日内瓦大学MIRALab实验室）
There are considerable advancements in medical health care in recent years, resulting in rising older population. As the workforce for such a population is not keeping pace, there is an urgent need to address this problem. Having robots to stimulating recreational activities for older adults can reduce the workload for caretakers and give them time to address the emotional needs of the elderly. In this paper, we investigate the effects of the humanoid social robot Nadine as an activity host for the elderly. This study aims to analyse if the elderly feels comfortable and enjoy playing game/acti…
Balancing and reacting to strong and unexpected pushes is a critical requirement for humanoid robots. We recently designed a capture point based approach which interfaces with a momentum-based torque controller and we implemented and validated it on the iCub humanoid robot. In this work we implement a Receding Horizon control, also known as Model Predictive Control, to add the possibility to predict the future evolution of the robot, especially the constraints switching given by the hybrid nature of the system. We prove that the proposed MPC extension makes the step-recovery controller more ro…
We perform a Systematic Literature Review to discover how Humanoid robots are being applied in Socially Assistive Robotics experiments. Our search returned 24 papers, from which 16 were included for closer analysis. To do this analysis we used a conceptual framework inspired by Behavior-based Robotics. We were interested in finding out which robot was used (most use the robot NAO), what the goals of the application were (teaching, assisting, playing, instructing), how the robot was controlled (manually in most of the experiments), what kind of behaviors the robot exhibited (reacting to touch, …
This paper proposes an architecture for achieving telexistence and teleoperation of humanoid robots. The architecture combines several technological set-ups, methodologies, locomotion and manipulation algorithms in a novel manner, thus building upon and extending works available in literature. The approach allows a human operator to command and telexist with the robot. Therefore, in this work we treat aspects pertaining not only to the proposed architecture structure and implementation, but also the human operator experience in terms of ability to adapt to the robot and to the architecture. Al…
Bipedal robots are essentially unstable because of their complex kinematics as well as high dimensional state space dynamics, hence control and generation of stable walking is a complex subject and still one of the active topics in the robotic community. Nowadays, there are many humanoids performing stable walking, but fewer show effective push recovery under pushes. In this paper, we firstly review more common used abstract dynamics models for a humanoid robot which are based on the inverted pendulum and show how these models can be used to provide walking for a humanoid robot and also how a …
Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia（意大利理工学院）；IRI CSIC-UPC（西班牙国家研究委员会-加泰罗尼亚理工大学机器人研究所）；AIST（日本产业技术综合研究所）；LAAS-CNRS（法国国家科学研究中心系统分析与架构实验室）；DIBRIS-UNIGE（热那亚大学计算机、生物工程、机器人与系统工程系）
The future where the industrial shop-floors witness humans and robots working in unison and the domestic households becoming a shared space for both these agents is not very far. The scientific community has been accelerating towards that future by extending their research efforts in human-robot interaction towards human-robot collaboration. It is possible that the anthropomorphic nature of the humanoid robots could deem the most suitable for such collaborations in semi-structured, human-centered environments. Wearable sensing technologies for human agents and efficient human-aware control str…
Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia（意大利技术研究院）；University of Genova（热那亚大学）；University of Manchester（曼彻斯特大学）；DeepMind（深度思维）
The topic of physical human-robot interaction received a lot of attention from the robotics community because of many promising application domains. However, studying physical interaction between a robot and an external agent, like a human or another robot, without considering the dynamics of both the systems may lead to many short-comings in fully exploiting the interaction. In this paper, we present a coupled-dynamics formalism followed by a sound approach in exploiting helpful interaction with a humanoid robot. In particular, we propose the first attempt to define and exploit the human help…
Fondazione Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia（意大利技术研究院）
Jumping can be an effective way of locomotion to overcome small terrain gaps or obstacles. In this paper we propose two different approaches to perform jumps with a humanoid robot. Specifically, starting from a pre-defined CoM trajectory we develop the theory for a velocity controller and for a torque controller based on an optimization technique for the evaluation of the joints input. The controllers have been tested both in simulation and on the humanoid robot iCub. In simulation the robot was able to jump using both controllers, while the real system jumped with the velocity controller only…
With an increasing need for elderly and disability care, there is an increasing opportunity for intelligent and mobile devices such as robots to provide care and support solutions. In order to naturally assist and interact with humans, a robot must possess effective conversational capabilities. Gestures accompanying spoken sentences are an important factor in human-to-human conversational communication. Humanoid robots must also use gestures if they are to be capable of the rich interactions implied and afforded by their humanlike appearance. However, present systems for gesture generation do …
The aim of this work is to build a cognitive model for the humanoid robot, especially, we are interested in the navigation and mapping on the humanoid robot. The agents used are the Alderbaran NAO robot. The framework is effectively applied to the integration of AI, computer vision, and signal processing problems. Our model can be divided into two parts, cognitive mapping and perception. Cognitive mapping is assumed as three parts, whose representations were proposed a network of ASRs, an MFIS, and a hierarchy of Place Representations. On the other hand, perception is the traditional computer …
Univ. of Bonn（波恩大学）；Autonomous Intelligent Systems（自主智能系统研究所）
Over the past few years, the Humanoid League rules have changed towards more realistic and challenging game environments, which encourage teams to advance their robot soccer performances. In this paper, we present the software and hardware designs that led our team NimbRo to win the competitions in the AdultSize league -- including the soccer tournament, the drop-in games, and the technical challenges at RoboCup 2018 in Montreal. Altogether, this resulted in NimbRo winning the Best Humanoid Award. In particular, we describe our deep-learning approaches for visual perception and our new fully 3…
This work presents a teleoperated humanoid robot system that can imitate human motions, walk and turn. To capture human motions, a Microsoft Kinect Depth sensor is used. Unlike the cumbersome motion capture suits, the sensor makes the system more comfortable to interact with. The skeleton data is extracted from the Kinect which is processed to generate the robot's joint angles. Robot Operating System (ROS) is used for the communication between the various parts of the code to achieve minimal latency. Thus the robot imitates the human in real-time with negligible lag. Unlike most of the human m…
This paper aims for a controller that can stabilize a position-controlled humanoid robot when standing still or walking on synthetic grass even when subjected to external disturbances. Two types of controllers are designed and implemented: ankle strategy and stepping strategy. The robot's joints consist of position-controlled servos which can be complicated to model analytically due to nonlinearities and non-measurable parameters, hence the dynamic model of the humanoid robot is acquired using a non-recursive least squares system identification. This model is also used to design a Kalman Filte…
This paper presents a solution to controlling humanoid robotic systems. The robot can be programmed to execute certain complex actions based on basic motion primitives. The humanoid robot is programmed using a PC. The software running on the PC can obtain at any given moment information about the state of the robot, or it can program the robot to execute a different action, providing the possibility of implementing a complex behavior. We want to provide the robotic system the ability to understand more on the external real world. In this paper we describe a method for detecting ellipses in rea…
Reducing the complexity of higher order problems can enable solving them in analytical ways. In this paper, we propose an analytic whole body motion generator for humanoid robots. Our approach targets inexpensive platforms that possess position controlled joints and have limited feedback capabilities. By analysing the mass distribution in a humanoid-like body, we find relations between limb movement and their respective CoM positions. A full pose of a humanoid robot is then described with five point-masses, with one attached to the trunk and the remaining four assigned to each limb. The weight…
Human-as-Humanoid: Enabling Zero-Shot Humanoid Learning from Ego-Exo Human Videos with Human-Aligned Embodiments
The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou)（香港科技大学（广州））；DeepCybo；ZGCA；ZGCI；Harbin Institute of Technology（哈尔滨工业大学）；Huazhong University of Science and Technology（华中科技大学）；Beihang University（北京航空航天大学）
We present data from two online human-robot interaction experiments where 227 participants viewed videos of a humanoid robot exhibiting faulty or non-faulty behaviours while either remaining mute or speaking. The participants were asked to evaluate their perception of the robot's trustworthiness, as well as its likeability, animacy, and perceived intelligence. The results show that, while a non-faulty robot achieves the highest trust, an apparently faulty robot that can speak manages to almost completely mitigate the loss of trust that is otherwise seen with faulty behaviour. We theorize that …
Humanoid robotics research depends on capable robot platforms, but recently developed advanced platforms are often not available to other research groups, expensive, dangerous to operate, or closed-source. The lack of available platforms forces researchers to work with smaller robots, which have less strict dynamic constraints or with simulations, which lack many real-world effects. We developed NimbRo-OP2X to address this need. At a height of 135 cm our robot is large enough to interact in a human environment. Its low weight of only 19 kg makes the operation of the robot safe and easy, as no …
