Sensory integration with articulated motion on a humanoid robot

Article type: Research Article

Authors: Rojas, J. | Peters II, R. A.

Affiliations: Center for Intelligent Systems, Vanderbilt University, Nashville TN, USA

Note: [] Corresponding Author: J. Rojas, Center for Intelligent Systems, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee, USA. Email: Juan.Rojas@vanderbilt.edu

Abstract: This paper describes the integration of articulated motion with auditory and visual sensory information that enables a humanoid robot to achieve certain reflex actions that mimic those of people. Reflexes such as reach-and-grasp behavior enables the robot to learn, through experience, its own state and that of the world. A humanoid robot with binaural audio input, stereo vision, and pneumatic arms and hands exhibited tightly coupled sensory-motor behaviors in four different demonstrations. The complexity of successive demonstrations was increased to show that the reflexive sensory-motor behaviors combine to perform increasingly complex tasks. The humanoid robot executed these tasks effectively and established the groundwork for the further development of hardware and software systems, sensory-motor vector-space representations, and coupling with higher-level cognition.

Keywords: Humanoid robotics, robot control, sensory-motor coordination

DOI: 10.1533/abbi.2004.0057

Journal: Applied Bionics and Biomechanics, vol. 2, no. 3-4, pp. 171-178, 2005