This paper presents the real time processing of optical motion capture with pan-tilt camera tracking. Pan-tilt camera tracking expands the range of capturing field dynamically. The asymmetrical marker distribution and polyhedra search algorithm realize robust labeling against missing markers. The algorithm is developed for parallel cluster computation and enables real time data processing. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the system.

Design and control of mechanical compliance would be one of the most important technical foci in making humanoid robots really interactive with humans. For task execution and safety insurance the issue must be discussed and offers useful and realistic solutions. We propose a theoretical design principle of mechanical compliance. Passive compliance implies a mechanically embedded compliance in drive systems and is reliable but not tunable in nature, while active compliance is a controlled compliance and, therefore, widely tunable, but less reliable specially in the high frequency domain. The basic idea of the paper is to use active compliance in the lower frequency domain and to rely on passive compliance in the higher frequency. H/sub /spl infin// control theory based on systems identification allows a systematic method to design the hybrid compliance in frequency domain. The proposed design is applied to the shoulder mechanism of a humanoid torso robot. Its implementation and experiments are to be shown with successful results.

Discusses the integration of "mechanical softness" into the humanoid robot mechanisms design. The mechanical softness includes such requirements as human-like high mobility and human-like sensitive compliance. We focus on the shoulder mechanism, and propose a parallel mechanism to integrate the two requirements. The mechanism is called the cybernetic shoulder and possesses three degrees-of-freedom. The nature of motion curves of the human shoulder, and the design and development of the cybernetic shoulder are described with the computation issue of kinematics. The integration of compliance into the parallel mechanism is also discussed, and its experimental evaluation is made.