Playing Catch and Juggling with a Humanoid Robot

Entertainment robots in theme park environments typically do not allow for physical interaction and contact with guests. However, catching and throwing back objects is one form of physical engagement that still maintains a safe distance between the robot and participants. Using a theme park type animatronic humanoid robot, we developed a test bed for a throwing and catching game scenario.

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Practical Kinematic and Dynamic Calibration Methods for Force-Controlled Humanoid Robots

This paper presents methods and experimental results regarding the identification of kinematic and dynamic parameters of force-controlled biped humanoid robots. We first describe a kinematic calibration method to estimate joint angle sensor offsets. The method is practical in the sense that it only uses joint angle and link orientation sensors, which most humanoid robots are equipped with.

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Video-Based 3D Motion Capture Through Biped Control

Marker-less motion capture is a challenging problem, particularly when monocular video is all that is available. We estimate biped control from monocular video by implicitly recovering physically plausible three-dimensional motion of a subject along with a character model (controller) capable of replaying this motion in other environments and under physical perturbations.

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