Chung, Wing Kwong. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2008. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 97-101). / Abstracts in English and Chinese. / Chapter 1 --- Introduction --- p.1 / Chapter 1.1 --- Motivation --- p.1 / Chapter 1.2 --- Related Work --- p.3 / Chapter 1.2.1 --- History of Humanoid Robots --- p.3 / Chapter 1.2.2 --- The Study of Humanoid Robots --- p.5 / Chapter 1.3 --- Thesis Overview --- p.6 / Chapter 2 --- Architecture --- p.8 / Chapter 2.1 --- Introduction --- p.8 / Chapter 2.2 --- Mechanical Design --- p.8 / Chapter 2.3 --- Hardware Platform --- p.11 / Chapter 2.4 --- Software Platform --- p.14 / Chapter 3 --- Kinematics --- p.15 / Chapter 3.1 --- Introduction --- p.15 / Chapter 3.2 --- Forward Kinematics --- p.15 / Chapter 3.2.1 --- Lower Limb --- p.17 / Chapter 3.2.2 --- Upper Limb --- p.19 / Chapter 3.3 --- Inverse Kinematics --- p.21 / Chapter 3.3.1 --- Lower Limb --- p.21 / Chapter 3.3.2 --- Upper Limb --- p.24 / Chapter 4 --- Gait Synthesis --- p.29 / Chapter 4.1 --- Introduction --- p.29 / Chapter 4.1.1 --- Difference Between Human and Robot Joints --- p.29 / Chapter 4.1.2 --- Difference Types of Gait for Humanoid Robots --- p.30 / Chapter 4.2 --- Related Works --- p.31 / Chapter 4.3 --- Gait Frame --- p.33 / Chapter 4.3.1 --- Analysis of Human Gait --- p.33 / Chapter 4.3.2 --- Gait Frame for PHR --- p.34 / Chapter 4.4 --- Gait Synthesis --- p.36 / Chapter 4.4.1 --- Mathematic Description of Bezier Curve --- p.36 / Chapter 4.4.2 --- Reasons for Using Bezier Curve for Gait Synthesis --- p.37 / Chapter 4.4.3 --- Gait Synthesis Using Bezier Curve Interpolation --- p.37 / Chapter 4.5 --- Experiments --- p.40 / Chapter 4.5.1 --- Experimental Setup --- p.40 / Chapter 4.5.2 --- Results --- p.40 / Chapter 4.6 --- Discussion --- p.43 / Chapter 4.7 --- Conclusion and Future Work --- p.44 / Chapter 5 --- Balance Algorithm for PHR --- p.45 / Chapter 5.1 --- Introduction --- p.45 / Chapter 5.2 --- Related Works --- p.45 / Chapter 5.3 --- Balance Algorithm --- p.47 / Chapter 5.4 --- Experiments --- p.51 / Chapter 5.4.1 --- Experimental Setup --- p.51 / Chapter 5.4.2 --- Results --- p.51 / Chapter 5.5 --- Discussion --- p.54 / Chapter 5.6 --- Conclusion and Future Work --- p.54 / Chapter 6 --- Human-robot Interaction System through Hand Gestures --- p.55 / Chapter 6.1 --- Introduction --- p.55 / Chapter 6.2 --- Related Works --- p.55 / Chapter 6.3 --- Flow of Hand Gesture Recognition --- p.57 / Chapter 6.4 --- Database Establishment --- p.60 / Chapter 6.4.1 --- Hand Detection and Preprocessing --- p.60 / Chapter 6.4.2 --- Extraction of Features --- p.62 / Chapter 6.4.3 --- Storage of Features --- p.68 / Chapter 6.5 --- Hand Gesture Recognition --- p.69 / Chapter 6.6 --- Experiments --- p.72 / Chapter 6.6.1 --- Experimental Setup --- p.72 / Chapter 6.6.2 --- Recognition Results --- p.73 / Chapter 6.7 --- Discussion --- p.75 / Chapter 6.8 --- Conclusion and Future Work --- p.75 / Chapter 7 --- Conclusion --- p.76 / Chapter 7.1 --- Research Summary --- p.76 / Chapter 7.2 --- Future Work --- p.78 / Chapter A --- Forward Kinematics of PHR --- p.79 / Chapter A.1 --- Lower Limb --- p.79 / Chapter A.2 --- Upper Limb --- p.82 / Chapter B --- Inverse Kinematics of PHR --- p.85 / Chapter B.1 --- Lower Limb --- p.85 / Chapter B.2 --- Upper Limb --- p.88 / Chapter C --- Zero Moment Point --- p.91 / Chapter D --- User Interface of PHR --- p.93

The overall objective of this thesis is to build an integrated, inexpensive, human-sized humanoid robot from scratch that looks and behaves like a human. More specifically, my goal is to build an android robot called Marie Curie robot that can act like a human actor in the Portland Cyber Theater in the play Quantum Debate with a known script of every robot behavior. In order to achieve this goal, the humanoid robot need to has degrees of freedom (DOF) similar to human DOFs. Each part of the Curie robot was built to achieve the goal of building a complete humanoid robot. The important additional constraints of this project were: 1) to build the robot from available components, 2) to minimize costs, and 3) to be simple enough that the design can be replicated by non-experts, so they can create robot theaters worldwide. Furthermore, the robot appears lifelike because it executes two main behaviors like a human being. The first behavior is tracking where the humanoid robot uses a tracking algorithm to follow a human being. In other words, the tracking algorithm allows the robot to control its neck using the information taken from the vision system to look at the nearest human face. In addition, the robot uses the same vision system to track labeled objects. The second behavior is grasping where the inverse kinematics (IK) is calculated so the robot can move its hand to a specific coordinate in the surrounding space. IK gives the robot the ability to move its end-effector (hand) closer to how humans move their hands.

Most of work on motion of mobile robots is to generate plans for avoiding obstacles or perform some meaningful and useful actions. In modern robot theatres and entertainment robots the motions of the robot are scripted and thus the performance or behavior of the robot is always the same. In this work we want to propose a new approach to robot motion generation. We want our robot to behave more like real people. People do not move in mechanical way like robots. When a human is supposed to execute some motion, these motions are similar to one another but always slightly or not so slightly different. We want to reproduce this property based on the introduced by us new concept of probabilistic regular expression, a method to describe sets of interrelated similar actions instead of single actions. Our goal is not only to create motions for humanoid robots that will look more naturally and less mechanically, but also to program robots that will combine basic movements from certain library in many different and partially random ways. While the basic motions were created ahead of time, their combinations are specified in our new language. Although now our method is only for motions and does not take inputs from sensors into account, in future the language can be extended to input/output sequences, thus the robot will be able to adapt the motion in different ways, to some sets of sequences of input stimuli. The inputs will come from sensors, possibly attached to limbs of controlling humans from whom the patterns of motion will be acquired.