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Medical mannequins provide the first hands-on training for nurses and doctors and help eliminate human mistakes that would otherwise take place with a real person. The closer the mannequin is to mimicking a human being, the more effective the training; thus, additional features such as movable limbs and eyes, vision processing and realistic social interaction will provide a more fulfilling learning experience. A humanoid robot with a 23 degree of freedom (DOF) hand was developed which is capable of performing complex dexterous tasks such as typing on a keyboard. A single DOF elbow and two DOF shoulder was designed and optimized to maintain human form while being able to dynamically lift common household items. A 6 DOF neck and 13 DOF face with a highly expressive silicone skin-motor arrangement has been developed. The face is capable of talking and making several expressions and is used to train the student to pick up on emotional cues such as eye contact and body language during the interview stage. A pair of 3 DOF legs and a torso were also developed which allows the humanoid to be in either the laying down or sitting up position. An algorithm was developed that only activates necessary areas of code in order to increase its cycle time which greatly increases the vision tracking capabilities of the eyes. The simulator was tested at Carilion Clinic in Roanoke VA with several of the medical staff and their feedback is provided in this document. / Master of Science

The advancements made in technology over the past several decades have brought the field of humanoid robotics closer to integration into the everyday lives of humans. Despite these advances, the cost of these systems consistently remains high, thus limiting the environments in which these robots can be deployed. In this thesis, a pair of low-cost, bio-mimetic legs for a humanoid robot was developed with 12 degrees of freedom: three at the hip, one at the knee, and two at the ankle. Prior to developing the robot, a survey of the human-sized robotic legs released from 2006-2012 was conducted. The analysis included a summary of the key performance metrics and trends in series of human-sized robots. Recommendations were developed for future data reporting that will allow improved comparison of different prototypes. The design of the new robotic legs in this thesis utilized human anatomy data to devise performance parameters and select actuators. The developed system was able to achieve comparable ROM, size, weight, and torque to a six-foot tall human. Position and zero-moment point sensors were integrated for use in balancing, and a control architecture was developed. A model of the leg dynamics was created for designing balancing and walking algorithms. In addition, hydraulic actuators were evaluated for use in humanoid robotics, and testing was conducted in order to create a position control methodology. Finally, a predictive deadband controller was designed that was able to achieve accuracy of less than one degree using a valve with slow switching speed. / Master of Science

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The objective of the thesis is utilizing body sensing technology to develop a more intuitive and convenient way to control robots. The idea is to build a body sensing control system based on Kinect framework. Through Kinect, users from different age groups can achieve the desired purposes through motion demonstration without complicated programming. The system can accurately calculate angle change from users¡¦ gestures in a motion and identify key-postures which can compose an emulation motion similar to the presenting one. In other words, from analyzing these key postures, the demonstrated behaviors are able to be represented internally. Therefore, the system, consisting of a kinematics computational module and a representation algorithm, not only provides the function of behavior emulation but also behavior representation. By representation algorithm, the system extracts the features of combined behaviors. Besides, with the modular programming methodology, different behaviors can be reorganized to generate new behaviors based on the set of key poses represented by the extracted features. The application implemented in this system is within the OpenNI and NITE environment. OpenNI is used to retrieve information that the Kinect captured. NITE is used to track the user skeleton. The system is demonstrated by a play of ¡§Tai-Ji-Advancer¡¨ and at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cSYS49JKVAA.

Integrating computer vision into a robotic system can provide a closed-loop controlled platform that increases the robustness of a robot's motion. This integration is also known as visual servo control or visual servoing. Visual servoing of a robot manipulator in real-time presents complex engineering problems with respect to both control and image processing particularly when we want the robot arm to perform complicated tasks such as portrait drawing. In my research, the implementation of torque feedback control and Image-based Visual Servoing (IBVS) approaches are proposed to improve previous open-loop portrait drawing tasks performed by Betty, a humanoid robot in the Autonomous Agent Lab, University of Manitoba. The implementations and evaluations of hardware, software and kinematic models are discussed in this document. I examined the problem of estimating ideal edges joining points in a pixel reduction image for an existing point-to-point portrait drawing humanoid robot, Betty. To solve this line drawing problem, two automatic sketch generators are presented. First, a modified Theta-graph, called Furthest Neighbour Theta-graph (FNTG). Second, an extension of the Edge Drawing Lines algorithm (EDLines), called Extended Edge Drawing Lines (eEDLines). The results show that the number of edges in the resulting drawing is significantly reduced without degrading the detail of the output image. The other main objective of this research is to propose the extension of the drawing robot project to further develop a robust visual servoing system for Betty to correct any drawing deviation in real-time as a human does. This is achieved by investigating and developing robust feature (lines and shading) extraction approaches for real-time feature tracking of IBVS in combination with adequate torque feedback in the drawing task.

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Šokis ir aerobika yra judesių programų pavyzdžiai - jos susideda iš tam tikra tvarka surikiuotų, pakartotinai naudojamų komponenčių. Norint efektyviai modeliuoti tokias programas, reikalinga formali žmogaus judesių notacija. Pasinaudoję esamomis priemonėmis (3D modeliavimo įrankiai, OGRE grafikos variklis, H-Anim) ir sukūrę savas, realizavome procedūrinių humanoido animacijų veikimo schemą. Ji leidžia sudaryti žmogaus judesių programą ir yra nesunkiai suprantama net ir tiems, kurie neturi animacijos ar trimačio modeliavimo patirties. Procedūrinės animacijos užrašomos XML formatu. Jas pavaizduoja mūsų peržiūros programa. Formatas leidžia abstrahuoti judesius į "procedūras", juos apjungti į sekas ir kaupti judesių bibliotekas. Turint pavienių judesių komponentes, procedūrinės animacijos kūrimas, pildymas ar keitimas yra žymiai paprastesnis ir lankstesnis, be to, tokia animacija yra nepriklausoma nuo humanoido modelio geometrijos. / Dance and aerobics are examples of movement programs – they consist of reusable components laid out in particular order. Efficient modeling of such programs requires the usage of some formal movement notation. With the help of existing tools and standards (3D modeling packages, OGRE graphics engine, H-Anim), as well as utilizing the ones we designed ourselves, we have implemented procedural humanoid animation schema. It allows for creating human movement programs and is easy to grasp even for those with no experience in animation or 3D modeling. Procedural animations are written in XML and visualized by our viewer software. Using our format, one can abstract movements into "procedures", combine them into sequences and store them in movement libraries. With all the individual movements at hand, creating, extending and modifying a procedural animation is much more simple and flexible. Moreover, this kind of animation is independent of model's geometry.

We present the design, analysis and construction of a biologicallyinspired tactile sensor. The sensor can measure normal and lateralforces, conform to the surfaces with which it comes in contact andincrease the friction of the surface for a good grasp.The sensor is built using a simple process and the applied forcesare read using standard electronics. These features make thesensors ideal for mass production.We are motivated to build tactile sensors that are useful forrobotic manipulation given that the current ones do not have thefeatures that we consider necessary. The sensors presented in thispaper have been designed to deal with these issues. They have beendesigned and implemented in the fingers of the humanoid robotObrero.

>Magister Scientiae - MSc / The SASL project at the University of the Western Cape is in the process of developing a machine translation system that can translate fully-fledged phrases between South African Sign Language (SASL) and English in real-time.To visualise sign language,the system aims to make use of a 3D humanoid avatar created by van Wyk. Moemedi used this avatar to create an animation system that visualises a small set of simple Phrases from very simple SignWriting notation input. This research aims to achieve an animation system that can render full sign language sentences given complex SignWriting notation glyphs with multiple sections. The specific focus of the research is achieving animations that are accurate representations of the SignWriting input in terms of the five fundamental parameters of sign language, namely, hand motion, location, orientation and shape, as well as non-manual features such as facial expressions. An experiment Was carried out to determine the accuracy of the proposed system on a set of 20 SASL phrases annotated with SignWriting notation. It was found that the proposed system is highly accurate, achieving an average accuracy of 81.6%.