A novel control scheme for biped robots to manipulate the ZMP three-dimensionally apart from the actual ground profile is presented. It is shown that the linear inverted-pendulum-like dynamics with this scheme can represent a wider class of movements including variation of the body height. Moreover, this can also represent the motion in aerial phase. Based on this, the foot-guided controller proposed by the authors is enhanced to enable the robots to locomote on highly uneven terrains and also to seamlessly transition between walking and running without pre-planning the overall motion reference. The controller guarantees the capturability at landing and defines the motion by a time-variant state feedback, which is analytically derived from a model predictive optimization. It is verified through some computer simulations.

A method to identify the kinematics model of a human hand that less suffers from the skin artifact is proposed based on a fact that the movements of nails with respect to the corresponding fingertip bones are much smaller than that of skin. It consists of two stages. In the first (individual) stage, the most likely combination of joint assignments and angles of each finger is identified through a dual-phase least squares method (LSM), where the joint angles are estimated in the inner LSM and the joint assignments in the outer LSM, from the movement of the hand dorsum with respect to the base coordinate frame attached to each nail. In the second (merging) stage, kinematic models of each finger are merged so as to compromise the estimated movements of the hand dorsum by them also through the dual-phase LSM. It is shown that the identified joint assignments have an advantage over several existing anthropomorphic robot hands based on the distribution of pinchability (DOP), which is also proposed in this paper as a novel index to evaluate the ability of in-hand manipulation.

This paper extends the longitudinal walking controller of biped robots proposed by one of the authors to walking along a smooth curved path. The previous controller defined in a fixed inertial frame is redesigned with respect to a moving frame attached to the center of mass (COM) of the robot in order to achieve walking along an arc. As a result, it is found that a desired position of the zero-moment point (ZMP) can be determined only from the local curvature of the referential path besides the state of the robot with respect to the moving frame. Thus, it is directly applicable to walking along an arbitrary smooth path including straight walk. In addition to the extension of the ZMP manipulation, techniques of foot control consistent with COM movement and automatic update of the referential COM position are fully extended to curved walk. The idea was examined through computer simulations to show responsiveness to updates of motion references and robustness against external disturbances.

This paper addresses an omnidirectional locomotion control to make a biped robot walk back and forth, turn to any direction, move sideways and carry out them seamlessly. This is achieved by integrating smooth-path-tracking and lateral walking controllers that have been proposed by the authors, which is not straightforward because the path tracking is designed to converge to a referential path while the lateral walking aims to go away from the path. It can be avoided by extending the path-tracking controller to consecutively redraw the orbit that passes the middle of the feet. The proposed controller is designed completely in the robot-centric frame, namely, all the references and the manipulated variables are represented from the robot's viewpoint so that the operator can issue the referential values in the first-person view. Additionally, as the robot is ruled by neither a plan of footsteps nor time-dependent trajectories, it can flexibly respond to various perturbations. The validity of the proposed controller is investigated through computer simulations and an application to navigation of the robot is also shown.

A novel biped control is proposed. It enables a robust foot-guided maneuver and suits to the locomotion in complex environments. It treats ZMP as an indirect manipulation variable rather than the control variable, and does not need to observe the acceleration. ZMP behavior is only constrained to approach the pivot foot during a step, so that the robot can flexibly accelerate itself. The most distinctive point to the previous methods is that the motion stability is guaranteed based on the capture point only at landing, which improves agility. The optimal input, i.e., the desired position of ZMP, is analytically obtained immediately from the current state of COM, time to land, and the desired landing position, so that it can be implemented with even less computation cost. Though the limitation of the supporting region is not explicitly taken into account, it is guaranteed that the desired ZMP is confined within the region based on its convexity.

A novel method to compute the contact force in forward dynamics simulation of rigid bodies based on contact volume is proposed. The conventional methods are based on contact vertices, where the normal and tangential directions are estimated with respect to each pair of facets or facet and vertex of colliding bodies. However, the normal direction is intrinsically determined based on the solid deformation. This paper proposes a novel method that combines the constraint-based method and the volumetric intersection computation. Since the method estimates a 6-axis resultant force directly, there are two problems that are how to predict the preferred deformation of the volume and how to confirm the friction limit. The idea is to apply the least-square method for the former and to check if the computed force can be resolved into each stress within the friction limit. The proposed method checks the condition with linear programming method through a pyramidal approximation.

An efficient method to compute the joint friction torques as well as the external contact forces in forward dynamics simulation of a robot manipulator is proposed. The existence of friction inside mechanical gears substantially affects behaviors of the robot, and hence, should be taken into account. The strict form of the equation of motion disables distinguishing the internal friction torques from the external forces, which causes an increase of the degree of indeterminacy and the computation cost. A semi-implicit approach in which the internal friction torques and the external contact forces are alternatively computed is proposed based on an assumption that the net joint actuation torque does not much vary in a short interval. It significantly reduces the computation cost at a comparative accuracy with a completely implicit method.

This paper presents a repetitive hopping control of biped robots, which has the following properties: 1) It can initiate or cease hopping at any time, 2) The peak altitude can be freely altered during hopping, and 3) The impact at touchdown is suppressed. Hopping motions accompany frequent changes of contact conditions with the environment and lead the discontinuity of dynamics they are governed, therefore, it is difficult to achieve the motion in a way without relying any passive mechanisms such as springs and dampers. Three controllers, that is, (I) a regulator to stabilize, (II) a controller to converge a desired velocity when lifting off the ground and (III) a controller to absorb the landing impact are unified by the global scheme to transit each other depending on a commanded value and the state of the robot.

A low-cost but accurate and backdrivable motor control system running on a DC motor and a harmonic drive gear is proposed. It compensates internal friction of the gear and the counter-electromotive torque by combining a model-based feed-forward method and a disturbance observer using a cheap torque sensor. A complementary use of those techniques lowers requirements to their performances i.e. precision, bandwidth, etc, while it is equipped with a flexible property against the external torque. A 2-DOF servo controller is also built upon the system in order to simultaneously achieve smooth responses and robust convergences to the reference.

A novel Kalman filter to estimate the center of mass (COM) of a Humanoid robot is proposed. In the conventional works, COM was estimated by some methods. First one is the kinematics computation based on the mass property of the robot and the global position and attitude of the body frame, but those errors degrade the estimation accuracy. Second is the double integral of COM acceleration computed by the measured external force. However, its accuracy suffers from the error accumulation with the integration and the initial error remains. Third is based on the relationship between COM and the zero-moment point (ZMP), but it ignores the torque around COM. Additionally, it only dealt with the horizontal movement. For those problems, the proposed method combines those informations in order to improve the accuracy. Particularly, in order to estimate three dimensional motion of COM, the proposed method reduces the offset included in the vertical component by utilizing the interference between the horizontal and vertical component of COM shown in third information. Through the simulation, the improvement by the proposed method is verified.

This paper presents a biped locomotion control to step sideways based on the framework of the dynamics morphing. Since the proposed controller does not require detailed referential motion trajectories, it enables a robot to walk sideways at arbitrary velocity given at random timing. Sideward locomotion is realized by alternating the velocity following control and the self-excited oscillating control accompanying with the exchange of the supporting foot. Techniques to automatically update the referential position of the center of mass and phase for the consistent footstep are also proposed.

A robust numerical solution of the prioritized inverse kinematics is proposed. It is based on the augmented Lagrangian function and Hestenes-Powell's multiplier method. It originates the weighted inverse kinematics and only requires a small modification including an accumulation of the error of the high-priority constraint at each step of iteration and an estimation of Lagrange's multiplier. Hence, it is preferable to the conventional method, which is accompanied with an explicit complex computation of the kernel space, from the viewpoint of both the implementation cost and the computation cost per step. A drawback is that the proposed method becomes slow in some situations since Lagrange's multiplier linearly converges, while the joint displacements superlinearly converge. In some unlucky situations, it requires more computation cost in total than the conventional method. However, the proposed method is robust even in cases where the high-priority constraint is unsatisfiable. In fact, the proposed method solely succeeded in all the tested cases including unsolvable ones.

This paper proposed a novel forward dynamics computation method which complexity is O(n) where n is the number of bodies. In this method, contact constraints based on the macroscopic method are relaxed by regularization technique, thereby the numerical stability is improved. The relaxation causes larger penetrations at contact points, which are compensated the penetrations at the momentum-level by low computation cost. In addition, a novel friction model was proposed. This model enables to compute the static friction more stably. The performance of the proposed method was evaluated by comparing with the microscopic and macroscopic methods with simulation of 6DOF pendulum's motion.

This paper reports the result and discussion about our second experiment of standing motion measurement and analysis. We aim at identifying the standing controller of a human. In order to tackle the dynamical complexity of the human body, the COM-ZMP (the center of mass and the zero-moment point) model, which is widely used for designing the whole-body controller of humanoid robots, and a piecewise-linear controller is applied. In the previous experiment, the authors proposed a method to collect a sufficient number of loci of COM in a phase space for the identification of a controller, and showed that the human's standing behavior qualitatively has a similar property with the COM-ZMP model. It was also found, however, that the collected loci had large variability due to the uncertainty of convergence point and were partially inconsistent with the model, so that it was still difficult to identify the controller. Then, the authors reassessed the model and measurement protocol, and conducted the second experiment in order to improve the reliability of the measurement by visually presenting the referential point to subjects and by redesigning the protocol. As the result, more reliable loci to be processed of identification were obtained. It was also found that the effect of variation of the COM height due to the limitation of leg length, which was thought to be another source of the inconsistency, certainly existed but was not critical to model the human behavior.

A novel technique of dead reckoning for biped robots, which could be utilized for agile motion controls, is proposed. A complementary filter combines the estimations of the position of robot body from both the kinematic computation and the acceleration information, where the former is relied on in the lower frequency domain and the latter is done on in the higher domain. Even though the supporting foot of the robot happens to roll and rotate on the terrain, the estimation accuracy of the kinematics is improved by taking such movements into consideration. We suppose that the contact point moves with respect to the ground at the instantaneously minimum velocity, and thus name it the instantaneous minimum velocity point (IMVP), which is estimated by an optimization. IMVP can be computed for each foot, so that the weighted sum of them by the magnitude of reaction forces on each foot is adopted as a candidate of the contact point under an assumption that the contact condition is more steady when a larger reaction force is applied. Finally, it is merged with the twice-integrated acceleration through the complementary filter, where the crossover frequency is also determined by the reaction forces. Hence, it is robust against the change of contact conditions. Results of computer simulations will show that the proposed method reduces the estimation error comparing with the conventional methods.

This paper proposes an identification technique of a human standing controller. The dynamics of a human is approximated by the macroscopic relationship between the center of mass and the zero-moment point. The standing controller is modelled by a piecewise-linear feedback, which was originally developed for humanoid robots. In the previous work, the authors found a qualitative similarity of the model to an actual human behavior observed in a phase space, and the next challenge was to identify the controller from those data. A difficulty is that the observed dynamics is a piecewise system due to the unilaterality of reaction forces, so that the identification is not straightforward. It is not trivial how to detect the switching point in each motion locus and how to find the trust region of the supposed model. The recursive-least-square (RLS) method, which can present the deviation of identified parameters and that of the reliability of the results, helps to estimate the trust region with a returning computation process. Through the identification, the validity of the proposed method was verified. More study about the availability of the COM-ZMP model and the piecewise-linear controller for the analyses of the human standing control is also reported.

A high-fidelity attitude estimation technique for wide and irregular movements is proposed, in which heterogeneous inertial sensors are combined in complementary way. Although the working frequency ranges of each sensor are not necessarily complementary, inverse sensor models are utilized in order to restore the original movements. In the case of 3D rotation, the sensor dynamics displays a highly nonlinear property. Even if it is approximated by a linear system, the inverse model of a sensor tends to be non-proper and unstable. An idea is to decouple it into the dynamics compensation part approximated by a linear transfer function and the strictly nonlinear coordinate transformation part. Bandpass filters inserted before the coordinate transformation guarantee that the total transfer function becomes proper and stable. Particularly, the differential operator of a high-pass filter cancels the integral operator included in the dynamics compensation of the rate gyroscope, which causes instability. The proposed method is more beneficial than Kalman filter in terms of the implementation since it facilitates a systematic design of the filter.

A novel biped control is proposed. Since it doesn't require referential motion trajectories defined by time, it can achieve longitudinal walking which is flexible enough to follow an arbitrary referential velocity given at random timing and to cope with unexpected external forces. The controller is developed based on the dynamics morphing, which is a framework to enable seamless transitions between various motions by continuously morphing the dynamical structure of the feedback system. Thus, it is compatible with the standing, the stepping-out for emergency, and so forth. Three key techniques are (i) morphing from the standing stabilizer with a stable equilibrium point to the velocity-follower which lacks any equilibrium points, (ii) a foot control maneuver which is automatically activated together with the morphing into the velocity following control, and (iii) automatic update of the referential position of COM for safety when going back to the standing stabilization. Although it is based on the same principle with the simulated regulator proposed by the author, the proposed controller is advantageous to it as it doesn't require an additional automaton to update the referential position of COM. The idea was examined through interactive computer simulations.

A robust numerical solution to the inverse kinematics is proposed based on the Levenberg-Marquardt (LM) method, where the squared norm of residual of the original equation with a small bias is used for the damping factor. A rather simple idea remarkably improves the numerical stability and the convergence performance, even in unsolvable cases. Discussion is done through an investigation of the condition number of the coefficient matrix. Comparison tests with conventional methods show that only the proposed method succeeds in all cases. It frees operators from being careful about the target position-orientation assignment of effectors so that it facilitates easy robot motion designs and remote operations.

A self-consistent autonomous foot stepping control is proposed. It works on a self-excited oscillator of COM (center of mass) developed by the author, in which the stabilizability is maximized through a nonlinear feedback to the ZMP (zero-moment point) manipulation. Different from the conventional artificial CPGs (central pattern generators), its dynamics seamlessly morphs from/to that of a standing controller and enables an easy tuning of controller parameters for the desired oscillation amplitude and period. Based on a novel motion index defined by a complex number, the phase and spatial information about the COM-ZMP movement is abstracted. By a successive estimation of the foot-liftable phase, the up-down of feet is controlled so that it automatically synchronizes to the COM-ZMP oscillation with the unilaterality constraint on the reaction forces explicitly taken into account.

A motion planning method for humanoid robots in life environments is proposed based on a two-stage approach, where a sequence of double support postures to represent discrete milestones of the biped locomotion is planned first, and then, a time series of the whole body configuration to interpolate them. This paper discusses the first stage. RRT (Rapidly-explored Random Tree) is utilized for the planning. The main problem is how to modify the sequence of randomly sampled double support postures into practically acceptable one. Some post-processing techniques including thinning and smoothing are presented. A necessary condition of the series of milestones is that a pair of adjacent postures has to share one fixed supporting foot as the pivot. In order to thin out unnecessary milestones, bypass nodes are inserted and Dijkstra's method is applied. A computer simulation in which a humanoid robot travels in an environment with some pieces of furniture is demonstrated.

We proposed a nonlinear reference shaping controller for a manipulator which shares its workspace with humans. In this paper, two adaptation methods to external force; “slow adaptation” and “rapid adaptation” are proposed for smoother reaching movements and submissive behavior to follow the force. These make smooth endpoint speed profiles and movements flexible to follow external force without detecting the force. The slow adaptation moderates the manipulator's endpoint acceleration, and it also enables the manipulator to handle subsequent changes of target endpoint positions. If the endpoint position is significantly changed by excessive external force, the rapid adaptation works to follow the force and restart the reaching movement smoothly. The validity of the proposed method is confirmed through computer simulations.

The goal of this paper is to answer (i) how the stabilization performance of a biped controller can be evaluated on a certain invariant supporting region, (ii) how the standing stabilizer which performs the best on a given supporting region can be designed, (iii) how the system can be judged if it is stabilizable by the best standing stabilizer without deforming the current supporting region, and (iv) how the supporting region should be deformed if it is judged to be necessary. In order to answer these question, the stable standing region is defined. It gives a criterion to design the best standing stabilizer, to judge if the deformation of the supporting region is necessary to stabilize the system, and to maneuver the stepping motion in accordance with the standing stabilizability condition, which is also defined in the paper. It is found that the best standing stabilizer can be designed by a simple pole-assignment technique. This framework unifies the standing stability and the stepping stability of bipedalism, which have been separately considered in conventional studies. The discussion goes on an approximate planar COM-ZMP model, in which the total mass is concentrated at the center of mass, and the position of ZMP is regarded as the input. Though it is the simplest dynamical model of bipeds, it can conceal differences of body constitutions and represent the macroscopic dynamics. Therefore, this paper contributes to not only the biped robot controller design but also the biomechanical analyses.

A robust self-consistent humanoid navigation method is proposed. For any given targeted position and orientation, the robot robustly chases them without bankruptcies such as leg-crossing, excess stride and deadlock. The key idea is to define a canonical stance with respect to the target independently from the current configuration, and trace them by each step alternately. It locally prioritizes the foot guidance and sacrifices the COM tracking in each step. Since the feet targets are defined consistently with the targeted COM, the global COM tracking and robust navigation including pivot turns are achieved as the result.

A nonlinear reference shaping method for manipulators which are operated in living environments is proposed. It generates an intermediate reference position, and it is combined with a control based on the virtual spring-damper hypothesis proposed by Arimoto et al. The initial acceleration is moderated by an intermediate reference position inserted between the original target and the current position of the manipulator's endpoint and by a second-order-lag filter. The endpoint position is fed back to the proposed controller to prevent from excessive trailing force and large acceleration. As the result, human-like smooth reaching motions and pliant behaviors against external forces are achieved. The validity of the proposed method is shown through computer simulations on a planar 4-DOF manipulator.

A stable non-linear oscillator for autonomous biped stepping control is designed in a top-down manner by morphing dynamics of standing regulator. It resolves three problems which have been in the conventional artificial CPG approaches, namely, (1) how to unify it with the standing control, (2) the controller parameter tuning with complicated networked unit oscillators, and (3) a design of an extra sensory feedbacks to be superimposed for stabilization. The proposed control is built upon the stabilizability-maximized COM-ZMP regulator developed by the author, and only a single parameter seamlessly connects it to a stable limit cycle without degrading the stabilization performance. By synchronizing the foot-lifting with a limit cycle of ZMP, a stable periodic alternate stepping is achieved. Since it is free from time-driven trajectory, it is expected to be a fundamental technique to build robust autonomous biped controllers.

A completely stepwise online pedipulation planning method is proposed. It is an analytical approach based on the general solution of the equation of motion of an approximate dynamical biped model whose mass is concentrated at the center of mass. A physically feasible referential trajectory with a constraint about the reaction force taken into account is planned only in one interval by relaxing the boundary condition, namely, by admitting a certain level of error between the desired and actually reached states, and discontinuity of zero-moment point at each end of the interval. It potentially creates responsive motions that require strong instantaneous acceleration. A semiautomatic continual pedipulation planning method is also presented. It generates a referential trajectory of the whole body only from the next desired foot placement. The validity of the proposed method is ensured through experiments with a small anthropomorphic robot.

An autonomous biped controller synthesizing the ZMP manipulation and the foot location is proposed; each of them has a strongly nonlinear property, so that they had been hard to be synthesized without referential trajectories given as functions of time. The former is equivalent to the partial indirect manipulation of the reaction force through the contact points with the environment to control the center of mass (COM) under the current supporting state. The latter means discontinuous relocation of grounding feet in order to deform the supporting region to include the desired but unachievable ZMP in the future. They run on an identical control system without any confliction, since they originate from the same simulated regulator in the sense that the feasible region of ZMP is not bounded. It is also shown that a cyclic walk is automatically generated without giving a walking period explicitly by coupling the support-state transition and the goal-state transition in a simulation.

Boundary condition relaxation (BCR) method proposed by the authors (2005) is enhanced to enable 3D hopping motion plannings from arbitrary initial conditions. The original BCR has an advantage that stepwise legged motion planning is realized in online by accepting an error from the desired goal state of the center of mass (COM) and discontinuity of the trajectory of the zero-moment point (ZMP). The main difficulty of the enhancement lies on that heterogeneous piecewise equations of motions have to be handled at once, and seamless conditioning about the angular-momentum conservation and the body attitude before/after contact phase changing have to be achieved. For the former issue, multiple boundary conditions of piecewise differential equations are set up and solved in the same way with the original BCR. They are based on an approximately mass-concentrated biped model, so that contact state transition and severe time constraints are dealt with at low computational cost. Vertical-horizontal interference of COM trajectory is also taken into account by applying numerical solution of the initial value problem of differential equations. For the latter, a Jacobian-based inverse kinematics with a continuously-varying weight-blending in accordance with the shift of the contact state is presented.

This paper proposes a computational method of contact forces working between multibody system and environment in forward dynamics based on both the microbody-deformation model and macro contact model. The combination of them simultaneously prevents the simulation from excess penetration in micro contact model and chattering in macro contact model. The difficulty lies on how to absorb the difference of duration between them. This problem is solved through the introduction of a timestep-dependent variable damper for a micro contact model and of error-norm minimization for a macro contact model

Communication skill is essential for social robots in various environments such as homes, offices, and hospitals, where the robots are expected to interact with humans. In this paper, we model the primitive nonverbal communication between two persons by mimetic communication model. The model consists of three groups of hidden Markov models (HMMs) hierarchically combined to recognize motions of the human and to generate the interactive motions of the robot. HMMs in the lower layer abstract the motion patterns and HMMs in the upper layer represent the interaction patterns. We demonstrate the validity of this model through kick boxing match between a motion-captured human and humanoid robot, where the robot can autonomously generate its motion in response to attacks by the human

A fast online gait planning method is proposed. Based on an approximate dynamical biped model whose mass is concentrated to COG, general solution of the equation of motion is analytically obtained. Dynamical constraint on the external reaction force due to the underactuation is resolved by boundary condition relaxation, namely, by admitting some error between the desired and actually reached state. It potentially creates responsive motion which requires strong instantaneous acceleration by accepting discontinuity of ZMP trajectory, which is designed as an exponential function. A semi-automatic continuous gait planning is also presented. It generates physically feasible referential trajectory of the whole-body only from the next desired foot placement. The validity of proposed is ensured through both simulations and experiments with a small anthropomorphic robot.

A design methodology to build miniature humanoid robots is discussed. Although light and small bodies would make aggressive types of motion experiments much safer and smoother, they would often cause self-collisions and even restrict the space to mount mechatronic components. In order to defeat some kinematic difficulties including the former issue, a technique to modularize and assign joints is proposed through our prototyped robot. And, as a solution against the latter issue, a portable core control unit which stores a stand-alone electronic system is also introduced through the second version of our humanoid, whose system centers around it.

Being expected as the utilities in the future, humanoid robots should be given much higher mobility. A seamless transition between contact and aerial phase is essential to behave robustly against disturbance in the real environment, and to expand the range of their activities and perform a variety of motion. Manipulation of both the contact condition and the external force is the key issue to enhance the mobility of humanoids since they are driven by the external force converted from the inner force through the interaction with the environment. The difficulty lies on the complexity of their dynamics so that they consist of number of degrees of freedom and their structures vary in accordance with contact phase transition. We propose variable impedant inverted pendulum (VIIP) model control, which allows one to handle the external force rather easily. The advantage of the proposed is that it is invariant on contact phase so that both cases in contact and in aerial are treated in the unified way. It also reduces the amount of computation. Thus, quick responsive motion of the robot can be practically achieved. We verified the effect of the controller in computer simulation, using a small humanoid robot model.

A humanoid robot is expected to be a rational form of machine to act in the real human environment and support people through interaction with them. Current humanoid robots, however, lack in adaptability, agility, or high-mobility enough to meet the expectations. In order to enhance high-mobility, the humanoid motion should be generated in real-time in accordance with the dynamics, which commonly requires a large amount of computation and has not been implemented so far. We have developed a real-time motion generation method that controls the center of gravity (COG) by indirect manipulation of the zero moment point (ZMP). The real-time response of the method provides humanoid robots with high-mobility. In the paper, the algorithm is presented. It consists of four parts, namely, the referential ZMP planning, the ZMP manipulation, the COG velocity decomposition to joint angles, and local control of joint angles. An advantage of the algorithm lies in its applicability to humanoids with a lot of degrees of freedom. The effectiveness of the proposed method is verified by computer simulations.

Since humanoid robots have a number of degrees-of-freedom in general, a pattern-based approach of the motion control reduces its difficulty. It is necessary, however, to absorb and compensate disturbances in order to maintain the stability of robots in the real world. We developed a balancing method for humanoid robots with a little modification of predesigned motion trajectories. The method proposed has an advantage that it is allowed to choose any combination of joints as modified properties, so that it has enough flexibility, being applicable for various types of robots and motions. It consists of two phases; in the first phase, the referential COG displacement is decided in accordance with both the short-term and the long-term absorption of disturbances. And in the second phase, the COG is manipulated with the whole-body cooperation, using the COG Jacobian. We verified the validity of the method with some simulations.

This paper describes a design of remote operation interface for humanoid robot with following three functions: (1) Body DOFs control interface through 3D robot model in a virtual environment, and it has two types of online stabilizing software for maintaining the body balance. (2) Environmental recognition display interface for sensors, sound and 3D vision. (3) Voice and face recognition interface for interacting with operator and a human in front of the robot body. Then, implementation and experiments on our humanoid robot H6 are denoted.

The H6 humanoid robot has been developed as a platform for the research on perception-action coupling in intelligent behaviour of humanoid type robots. The H6 features: 1) a body which has enough DOFs and each joint has enough torque for full body motion; 2) a PC/AT compatible high-performance on-board computer which is controlled by RT-Linux so that from low-level to high-level control is achieved simultaneously; 3) self-contained and connected to a network via radio Ethernet; and 4) dynamic walking trajectory generation, motion planning and 3D vision functions are available. The H6 can be used as a common test-bed in experiment for various aspects of intelligent humanoid robotics.

This paper introduces and describes a novel method which enables the online generation of humanoid walking patterns that follow desired footprint locations. Online generation is realized by the dynamically stable mixture and connection of pre-designed motions. Characteristics of zero moment point (ZMP) are utilized in order to maintain the overall dynamic stability of "mixed" motions. Experiments using an online pattern generation software system and online walking control joystick interface for the humanoid robot H6 are introduced to show the validity of the method.

A humanoid robot "H6" is developed as a platform for the research on perception-action coupling in intelligent behaviour of humanoid type robots. The H6 has the features as follows: 1) a body which has enough DOFs and each joint has enough torque for full body motion, 2) a PC/AT compatible on-board computer which is controlled by RT-linux so that low-level to high-level control is achieved simultaneously, 3) is self-contained and connected to a network via radio ethernet, 4) a 3D vision function can be applied. The H6 is expected to be a common test-bed for experiment and discussion for various aspects of intelligent humanoid robotics.