Explore the vast range of titles available.

Entertainment robotics has garnered significant attention in recent years, with researchers focusing on developing robots capable of performing a variety of tasks, including magic, drawing, dancing, and music. This article presents our research on forming a musical band that includes both humanoid robots and human musicians, with the goal of achieving natural synchronization and collaboration during musical performances. We utilized two of our humanoid robots for this project: Polaris, a mid-sized humanoid robot, as the drummer, and Oscar, a Robotis-OP3 humanoid robot, as the keyboardist. The technical implementation incorporated essential components such as visual servoing, human-robot interaction, and Robot Operating System (ROS), enabling seamless communication and coordination between the humanoid robots and the human musicians. The success of this collaborative effort can be both seen and heard through the following YouTube link: https://youtu.be/pFOyt1KKCfY?feature=shared .

Active balancing in autonomous humanoid robots is a challenging task due to the complexity of combining a walking gait with dynamic balancing, vision and high-level behaviors. Humans not only walk successfully over even and uneven terrain, but can recover from the interaction of external forces such as impacts with obstacles and active pushes. While push recovery has been demonstrated successfully in, expensive robots, it is more challenging with robots that are inexpensive, with limited power in actuators and less accurate sensing. This work describes a closed-loop feedback control method that uses an accelerometer and gyroscope to allow an inexpensive humanoid robot to actively balance while walking and recover from pushes. Three common balancing strategies: center of pressure, centroidal moment pivot, and step-out, for biped robots are studied. An experiment is performed to test three hand-tuned closed-loop feedback control configurations; using only the gyroscope, only the accelerometer, and a combination of both sensors to recover from pushes. Each of the sensors is discretized into four discrete domains in order to categorize pushes with different strengths. Experimental results show that the combination of gyroscope and accelerometer outperforms the other methods with 100% recovery from a light push and 70% recovery from a strong push. The proposed closed-loop feedback control is examined in both simulation and real-world.

A spherical wheel robot or Ballbot—a robot that balances on an actuated spherical ball—is a new and recent type of robot in the popular area of mobile robotics. This paper focuses on the modeling and control of such a robot. We apply the Lagrangian method to derive the governing dynamic equations of the system. We also describe a novel Fuzzy Sliding Mode Controller (FSMC) implemented to control a spherical wheel mobile robot. The nonlinear nature of the equations makes the controller nontrivial. We compare the performance of four different fuzzy controllers: (a) regulation with one signal, (b) regulation and position control with one signal, (c) regulation and position control with two signals, and (d) FSMC for regulation and position control with two signals. The system is evaluated in a realistic simulation and the robot parameters are chosen based on a LEGO platform, so the designed controllers have the ability to be implemented on real hardware.

[...]in this period it has become a major focus for humanoid robotics, since advances in hardware and software, decreases in cost, and the goal of having robots function in domains intended to be inhabited by humans have made humanoids a more approachable tool for researchers. [...]a variety of humanoid robot competitions have become prominent. The first paper in the special issue HuroCup – Competition for Multi-Event Humanoid Robot Athletes by Baltes et al. introduce the philosophy and history behind the HuroCup competition, a nine-event multi-event, where a single robot competes in sprint, obstacle run, lift and carry, basket ball, long jump, marathon, weight-lifting, wall climbing, and united soccer.

Recently, the field of robotics development and control has been advancing rapidly. Even though humans effortlessly manipulate everyday objects, enabling robots to interact with human-made objects in real-world environments remains a challenge despite years of dedicated research. For example, typing on a keyboard requires adapting to various external conditions, such as the size and position of the keyboard, and demands high accuracy from a robot to be able to use it properly. This paper introduces a novel hierarchical reinforcement learning algorithm based on the Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (DDPG) algorithm to address the dual-arm robot typing problem. In this regard, the proposed algorithm employs a Convolutional Auto-Encoder (CAE) to deal with the associated complexities of continuous state and action spaces at the first stage, and then a DDPG algorithm serves as a strategy controller for the typing problem. Using a dual-arm humanoid robot, we have extensively evaluated our proposed algorithm in simulation and real-world experiments. The results showcase the high efficiency of our approach, boasting an average success rate of 96.14% in simulations and 92.2% in real-world settings. Furthermore, we demonstrate that our proposed algorithm outperforms DDPG and Deep Q-Learning, two frequently employed algorithms in robotic applications.

The development of a versatile, fully-capable humanoid robot as envisioned in science fiction books is one of the most challenging but interesting issues in the robotic field. Currently, existing humanoid robots are designed with different purposes and applications in mind. In humanoid robot development process, each robot is designed with various characteristics, abilities, and equipment, which influence the general structure, cost, and difficulty of development. Even though humanoid robot development is very popular, a few review papers are focusing on the design and development process of humanoid robots. Motivated by this, we present this review paper to show variations in the requirements, design, and development process and also propose a taxonomy of existing humanoid robots. It aims at demonstrating a general perspective of existing humanoid robots’ characteristics and applications. This paper includes state-of-the-art and successfully reported existing humanoid robot designs along with different robots used in various robot competitions.

The field of humanoid robotics is constantly evolving, with new advances creating exciting opportunities for research and development. Especially in the entertainment area, robotics applications show significant growth potential. To guide and track the progress of robotics research, good benchmark problems are crucial, but especially investigating human–robot interaction capabilities is difficult. This paper examines robot magic shows as a benchmark and research direction for entertainer robots and discusses flexible and versatile system architectures for robot magicians in the humanoid robot application challenge competition since 2017. The goal is a detailed analysis of magic tricks and magician robots presented in front of audiences. This paper reviews the hardware components and examines the robot platforms of participating teams in the robot magic show, the types of magic performances, the magic tricks and tools, the algorithms for the magic tricks, and the framework for humanoid robots. By providing a comprehensive analysis of these elements, we can gain insight into the capabilities of advanced humanoid robots for high-performance magic tricks. In conclusion, this paper highlights the exciting potential of humanoid robotics and entertainment fusion. In addition, we analyze the use of humanoid robots in magic shows, presenting the industrial potential of entertainer robots.

Nowadays humanoid robots have generally made dramatic progress, which can form a coalition replacing human work in dangerous environments such as rescue, defense, exploration, etc. In contrast to other types of robots, humanoid robots’ similarity to human make them more suitable for performing such a wide range of tasks. Rescue applications for robots, especially for humanoid robots are exciting. In rescue operating conditions, tasks’ dependencies, tasks’ repetitive accomplishment requirements, robots’ energy consumption, and total tasks’ accomplishment time are key factors. This paper investigates a practical variant of the Multi-Robots Task Allocation (MRTA) problem for humanoid robots as multi-humanoid robots’ task allocation (MHTA) problem. In order to evaluate relevant aspects of the MHTA problem, we proposed a robust Multi-Objective Multi-Humanoid Robots Task allocation (MO-MHTA) algorithm with four objectives, namely energy consumption, total tasks’ accomplishment time, robot’s idle time and fairness were optimized simultaneously in an evolutionary framework in MO-MHTA, which address for the first time. MO-MHTA exhibits multi-objective properties in real-world applications for humanoid robots in two phases. In the first phase, the tasks are partitioned in a fair manner with a proposed constraint k-medoid (CKM) algorithm. In the second phase, a new non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm with special genetic operators is applied. Evaluations based on extensive experiments on the newly proposed benchmark instances with three robust multi-objective evolutionary algorithms (MOEAs) are applied. The proposed algorithm achieves favorable results in comparison to six other algorithms. Besides, the proposed algorithm can be seen as benchmark algorithms for real-world MO-MHTA instances.

The use of robots in performance arts is increasing. But, it is hard for robots to cope with unexpected circumstances during a performance, and it is almost impossible for robots to act fully autonomously in such situations. IROS-HAC is a new challenge in robotics research and a new opportunity for cross-disciplinary collaborative research. In this paper, we describe a practical method for generating different personalities of a robot entertainer. The personalities are created by selecting speech or gestures from a set of options. The selection uses roulette wheel selection to select answers that are more closely aligned with the desired personality. In particular, we focus on a robot magician, as a good magic show includes good interaction with the audience and it may also include other robots and performers. The magician with a variety of personalities increased the audience immersion and appreciation and maintained the audience’s interest. The magic show was awarded first prize in the competition for a comprehensive evaluation of technology, story, and performance. This paper contains both the research methodology and a critical evaluation of our research.

Recent advances in humanoid robotics have opened up many new directions for humanoid robotics research. Multimedia and arts are applications with significant growth opportunities. In this paper, we introduce magic shows as a benchmark and research problem for humanoid robots and discuss our flexible and versatile system architecture. The goal is to have a humanoid robot perform as a magician in front of an audience. Note that we focus on magic performances that require complex manipulation and interaction of the robot instead of tricks where the robot is passive and used mainly as a prop. So in our tricks, the magic is critically dependent on the skills of the humanoid robot. Furthermore, a successful magic show requires that the robot interacts meaningfully and goal directed with the audience. We describe the technical details of a pen and drawing magic trick, the human-robot collaboration, hardware architecture, and software architecture of our system. One interesting aspect of our system is the inclusion of various personalities for the robot magician. Overall, the robot performed the magic tricks well in the competition and won third place at the IEEE IROS Humanoid Application Challenge(HAC) 2019 in Macau.