Neuroinformatics Group

Universität BielefeldTechnische FakultätNI

4

Tactile Sensing

Providing the sense of touch to robots is one of the most important challenges to advance towards more complex manipulation capabilities in robotics. We are developing tactile sensors for use in robot hands, sensorized objects, and human data gloves. Futhermore we are developing Tactile Servoing methods exploiting tactile sensors directly for robot control. read more »

What does a hand-over tell? - Comparative analysis of kinematic data

Which relations exist between properties of animals or people and their kinematic patterns? For example, can we tell, who performed a hand-over of which kind of object under which conditions just by looking at the sequence of joint angles? We try to find answers to these questions by employing a 3D motion tracking system.

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Robots Exploring their Bodies Autonomously (REBA)

Motivated by the need of complex anthropomorphic robots to manage sophisticated spatial relationships between parts of their body and the environment, together with recent findings from the neurosciences about how the brain solves this challenge by means of a highly adaptable “body schema”, the present proposal pursues the goal of
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Autonomous Exploration of Manual Interaction Space

We gradually increase our manual competence by exploring manual interaction spaces for many different kinds of objects. This is an active process that is very different from passive perception of "samples". The availability of humanoid robot hands offers the opportunity to investigate different strategies for such active exploration in realistic settings. In the present project, the investigation of such strategies shall be pursued from the perspective of „multimodal proprioception:“ correlating joint angles, partial contact information from touch sensors and joint torques as well as visual information about changes in finger and object position in such a way as to make predictions about "useful aspects" for shaping the ongoing interaction.

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Download and Installation

Neo/NST is developed mainly for Unix systems. Supported operating systems include Linux, Solaris and Mac OS X. The installation should be straight forward:

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