V-HRP : Virtual Humanoid Robot Platform

We have developed a simulator of humanoid robots and a controller of their whole body motions in MITI’s Humanoid Robotics Project. The simulator can emulate the dynamics of the motions of the robots whose structure may vary, and generate a sequence of the £elds of view from the eyes of the robot according to the motions. The structure-varying system is managed by introducing virtual links. The controller can handle a biped locomotion, a dynamic balance control at the standing position and collision avoidance motions for the robots. These software modules are integrated via CORBA, which enables the Internet clients to use the software. A humanoid robot testbed has also been developed to verify the accuracy of the simulation by experiments in the real world. We call the system Virtual Humanoid Robot Platform which we expect to be the virtual counterpart of the hardware robot platform for humanoid robotics.

[1]  John F. Canny,et al.  A Computational Approach to Edge Detection , 1986, IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence.

[2]  Yoshihiko Nakamura,et al.  Dynamics computation of closed-link robot mechanisms with nonredundant and redundant actuators , 1989, IEEE Trans. Robotics Autom..

[3]  Akihito Sano,et al.  Realization of natural dynamic walking using the angular momentum information , 1990, Proceedings., IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation.

[4]  Dinesh Manocha,et al.  OBBTree: a hierarchical structure for rapid interference detection , 1996, SIGGRAPH.

[5]  Katsushi Ikeuchi,et al.  Object shape and reflectance modeling from observation , 1997, SIGGRAPH.

[6]  Masashi Baba,et al.  Calibrated computer graphics: a new approach to realistic image synthesis based on camera calibration , 1998, Proceedings. Fourteenth International Conference on Pattern Recognition (Cat. No.98EX170).

[7]  Atsuo Takanishi,et al.  Development of a bipedal humanoid robot-control method of whole body cooperative dynamic biped walking , 1999, Proceedings 1999 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (Cat. No.99CH36288C).

[8]  Katsu Yamane,et al.  Dynamics computation of structure-varying kinematic chains for motion synthesis of humanoid , 1999, Proceedings 1999 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (Cat. No.99CH36288C).