Collaborative Research Resources: An Experimental Platform for Humanoid Robotics Research

该奖项提供资金，用于在芝加哥大学机器人研究所建造最先进的人形机器人实验设施。人形机器人的发展推动了机器人学和自动化技术的发展。研究人员建造类人机器人来测试和探索他们关于人类如何工作的理论。类人机器人开始在我们社会的服务领域发挥着重要的经济作用。首先，类人机器人激发了人们的灵感。例如，日本正在宣传其人形机器人研究，以让更多的孩子对科学和工程感兴趣，这是目前美国主要关注的问题。PI将从Sarcos Research Corporation购买一个上肢人形机器人，以及两个较小的机器人和一个先进的接口设备。使用拟议的设备，私人投资机构将承担四大类项目：核心机器人学和视觉研究，大幅提高机器人的能力和技能(Atkeon，Hebert，Rizzi，Pollard)；创作工具，使不是机器人专家甚至可能不是程序员的人更容易开发关于机器人的新应用程序(Hodgins，Hudson，Kuffner)；在不同应用领域对人形机器人进行应用原型和评估(Pausch，Kiesler)；以及统一应用程序，涉及大量跨学科研究人员。除了预期的机器人研究人员外，该团队还包括来自人机界面和社会学的研究人员，以研究如何使这些机器人易于使用，以及它们将如何适应社会。总而言之，这些项目将显著扩大控制类人机器人和在其上开发应用程序的能力。这些项目还将增加对机器人中人类形式的力量的基本理解，以及我们对人类运动的基本理解。PI将鼓励CMU和美国的其他研究人员使用该设施，利用其在视觉、语言和推理方面的优势。最后，PI正在使用类人机器人来探索人类行为是如何产生的计算模型。使用类人机器人作为研究工具，迫使研究人员处理复杂的物理设备和复杂的任务。重建人体运动所需的知识也将有助于增加我们对人们如何运动的理解，并可能导致物理康复和运动医学的进步。与大多数生物力学研究不同，PI将试图完善对人类运动的功能组成部分(如运动和抓取)的科学理解，以及使其看起来正常、像人类和富有表现力的微妙风格组成部分。将这两个组成部分结合起来，应该会使这些模型有助于分析有抱负的运动员的表现，以及诊断个人的运动和操作问题。

This award provides funds to build a state of the art humanoid robot experimental facility at CMU's Robotics Institute. Developing humanoid robots pushes robotics and automation technology forward. Researchers build humanoid robots to test and explore their theories about how humans work. Humanoid robots are beginning to play an economically important role in the service segment of our society. Primarily, humanoid robots inspire. For example Japan is publicizing its humanoid robotics research to get more children interested in science and engineering, currently a major concern in the U.S.The PIs will purchase an upper body humanoid from Sarcos Research Corporation as well as two smaller robots and an advanced interface device. Using the proposed equipment, the PIs will undertake a number of projects which fall into four broad classes: core robotics and vision research that substantially increases the capabilities and skills of robots (Atkeson, Hebert, Rizzi, Pollard), authoring tools that will make it easier for people who are not roboticists and perhaps even not programmers to develop new applications on robots (Hodgins, Hudson, Kuffner), application prototyping and assessment of humanoid robots in various application domains (Pausch, Kiesler), and unifying applications, which involve a large number of interdisciplinary researchers. In addition to the expected robotics researchers, the team includes researchers from HCI and sociology to work on how these robots might be made easy to use and how they will fit into society. Taken together, these projects will significantly expand the ability both to control humanoid robots and to develop applications on them. These projects will also increase fundamental understanding of the power of the human form in a robot, and our fundamental understanding of human motion. The PIs will encourage other researchers at CMU and in the U.S. to use the facility, taking advantage of strengths in vision, speech, and reasoning. Finally, the PIs are using humanoid robots to explore computational models of how human behavior is generated. Using a humanoid robot as a research tool forces the researchers to deal with a complex physical apparatus and complex tasks. The knowledge required to recreate human motions will also serve to increase our understanding of how people move and may lead to advances in physical rehabilitation and sports medicine. In contrast to most biomechanical research, the PIs will attempt to refine scientific understanding of both the functional components of human motion such as locomotion and grasping and also the subtle stylistic components that make it appear normal, humanlike, and expressive. Combining these two components should make the models useful for analyzing the performance of aspiring athletes as well as diagnosing individual problems with locomotion and manipulation.