In order for robots to be able to assist humans at a very close distance, robots should allow contacts occurred at many places and deal with them. For realizing such functions, robots should have whole-body soft sensor exterior for preparing contacts against almost every body parts since it is difficult to limit where to be touched from humans. Although several groups have developed humanoid type robots which have soft tactile sensors, most of them detects distributed 1-axis forces and that is not sufficient when the robot and a human have contacts very closely. In addition to that, there is no consideration in the previous studies about humans' movement during close contact with the robots. In order to solve these problems, we have newly developed a humanoid with soft 3D-deformable sensor flesh and automatic recoverable mechanical overload protection mechanism. Soft 3D-deformable sensors are implemented by molding the infrared light receiving devices into the urethane cube and by detecting the changes of the output voltage of the devices during the deformation. On the other hand, automatic recoverable mechanical overload protection mechanism is implemented by small mechanical torque limiters and monitoring system for embedded potentiometers in the torque limiters. Also detail implementation of the embedded electric system and the overall software structure is described in this paper.

In some important robotic human daily life support applications, such as housework or nursing care, soft sensor exterior is needed for allowing close contacts against humans or environments. Although there are many studies on tactile sensing elements themselves and some of them realize the mechanical softness of the element, most of their studies just propose their detection theory with their sensor element prototypes and it is difficult to use them for developing soft tactile exterior. Therefore a soft sensor exterior embedded with multi-axis deformation sensor is developed in this paper. The most important feature for this sensor is that it can detect multi-axis deformation, and the sensor element itself has enough softness to deform with the outer exterior. The developed sensor is constructed by molding a soft urethane foam with infrared LEDs and corresponding phototransistors. It detects 3D deformation of the sensor as voltage changes at each phototransistors. Furthermore, a prototype of soft sensor exterior embedded with the developed sensing elements is realized and we confirmed that the 3D deformation, such as stroking, pinching, and pushing, can be detected using the developed sensor exterior prototype.

In this paper, the development of a robot which has "flesh" made of soft polyurethane foam is presented. In order for a robot to behave in contact with an environment, people and itself, it is necessary to have not only rigid bone but also soft flesh. We developed a small humanoid robot "macra" which has thick soft flesh with distributed tactile sensors. A comparative discussion about possible materials of soft cover is described, and then thermal design was explored. A problem about movability of joints and implementation of tactile sensing was described. In the last part of this paper, several examples of advantages which are derived from soft polyurethane foam exterior parts with distributed three-axis force/torque sensors are shown.

This paper presents the concepts, issues on development, and future perspectives of a novel musculoskeletal humanoid `Kotaro'. The specifications and advantages of Kotaro include muscle-driven endoskeletal structure, multiple degrees of freedom, variable physical softness, the multiple-joint spine, easily configurable muscles, distributed onbody controllers, various sorts of many sensors including eyes, ears, and whole-body tactile sensors, and so on. These characteristics would achieve a flexible body, litheness of motions, safety, and adaptability and applicability to diverse tasks which would very often appear in human's daily lives

In this paper, we focused on concepts of behavior modifier. We aim to build a system, which acquires concepts of behavior modifier and applies it to motion generation of robots. For a form of motion representation, an existing research achievement, which statistically abstracts motion with known sets of motion examples and represents motions as points in a space, was adopted. Our system uses tendency of motions with adverbial modifier in the space to represent concepts of behavior modifier. The system has a simple representation form and has interactiveness what has potential advantage of ability to be applied to various motion concepts.