CB2: A child robot with biomimetic body for cognitive developmental robotics

Abstract

This paper presents a new research platform, CB 2 , a child robot with biomimetic body for cognitive developmental robotics [1] developed by the Socially-Synergistic Intelligence (Hereafter, Socio-SI) group of JST ERATO Asada Project. The Socio-SI group has focused on the design principles of communicative and intelligent machines and human social development through building a humanoid robot that has physical and perceptual structures close to us, that enables safe and close interactions with humans. For this purpose, CB 2 was designed, especially in order to establish and maintain a long-term social interaction between human and robot. The most significant features of CB 2 are a whole-body soft skin (silicon surface with many tactile sensors underneath) and flexible joints (51 pneumatic actuators). The fundamental capabilities and the preliminary experiments are shown, and the future work is discussed.

Design of a Tactile Sensor for Robot Hands

“…The skin has low spatial resolution (transducer area is of about 25 cm 2 ), and it has the possibility of measuring only stimuli at frequencies higher than 5-10 Hz, Figure 12. A similar solution has been adopted in the CB2 humanoid robot (Minato et al, 2007). The robot it has humanlike appearance similar to a child-size boy.…”

“…On the robot there are 197 sensors providing output at a frequency of 100 Hz, Figure 15. (Minato et al, 2007). CB2 has been developed by JST ERATO Asada Synergistic Intelligence Project Finally, Kotaro (Mizuuchi et al, 2006), is a very complex musculo-skeletal humanoid robot where tactile sensing is obtained using flexible with bandages formed by two flexible printed circuit boards with a intermediate layer of pressure-sensitive conductive rubber forming 64 taxels.…”

Tactile Guidance for Policy Adaptation

“…For example, tactile feedback is detected in order to minimize resistance to movement during demonstration with an industrial arm (Grunwald et al, 2003), and to minimize the support forces provided by a teacher during humanoid behavior learning (Minato et al, 2007). Tactile interactions between a robotic pet-surrogate and elderly patients also are mapped to reward signals, that are used within a Reinforcement Learning paradigm to adapt behavior selection (Wada and Shibata, 2007).…”

Large Scale Capacitive Skin for Robots

“…Each bandage has 64 taxels, but no integrated data acquisition electronics is mentioned. Piezoelectric transducers are used for the humanoid robots Robovie-IIS [10] and CB2 [11]. The transducers were placed individually on the robots and the sensitive skin has a low spatial resolution.…”