DESIGN AND DEVELOPMENT OF AN INTERACTIVE ROBOTIC HEAD

Friday, April 10, 2015

Introduction

Design and development of robotic head has goal of developing research platform for interactive features in robotics, performing basic head and eye movements like a human head. Although there are large numbers of researches are going on regarding this topic, as far no one was able to develop a completely humanoid robotic head with perfect interactive features.


Project scope

Main objectives of the project are design of a robotic head with basic head motions and vision with movable eyes, development of coordinated head - eye movements and development of the robot head for interactive features.

Modeling of robotic head with close resemblance to a human head, construction of mechanical and electrical designs and software development testing and calibrations are the parts of the project. At the beginning, existing robotic heads and human bionomical data were studied and considering them robotic head is designed with appropriate specifications. A  kinematic  analysis  has  been  carried  out  for  the  robotic head using the Euler angle method to determine the trajectory of  a  pre-specified  point  on  the  head  with  the  variation  of rotational  angles  of  actuating  motors  in  the  neck  section. 


Robotic head is incorporated with 6 DOFs. It has 3 DOFs  for  the  neck  section  and  3  DOFs  for  the  eye movements.  This  has  given  the robotic head  the  capability  to  reproduce natural  human  head/eye  motions  to  a  higher  degree. Binocular  vision  has  been  achieved  using two  cameras  and vision  based  social  interactive  features  are  proposed  to  be implemented on the robotic head. The control and processing system has been divided in to two parts as a station computer for image processing and a  micro  controller  for  the  other control and processing tasks.

features on  anthropomorphic  robotic  heads are tracking  and  following  a  human  hand  which  moves  in  front of  the  head  is  a  more  sophisticated  social  interactive  feature and  this  can  also  be  used  in  developing  further  interactive features  such  as  hand  gesture  recognition  and  responding  to them.  Because  of  that,  initially,  tracking  and  following  a human  hand  with  coordinated  head/eye  movements  has  been selected  as  the  interactive  feature  to  be  incorporated  in  to the robotic head. 

Conclusion

The proper positioning of actuators and vision hardware has  been  discussed  with  due  attention  to  the  related  bio-mechanical  constraints  and  requirements. This is currently in the actual construction phase and once the  construction  is  complete,  it  can  be  used  as  a  research platform for developing socially interactive  features.



Supervised by: Dr.Buddhika Jayasekara

Group members: 
M.H.C.Lakshan | L.H.H.Madurangi | M.K.B.S.Munasinghe |M.A.V.J.Muthugala 

Posted in: