Humanoid as a research vehicle into flexible complex interaction

Abstract

This paper considers the humanoid research as an approach to understanding and realizing complex real world interactions among the robot, environment, and human. As a first step towards extracting a common principle over the three term interactions, the concept of action oriented control has been investigated with simulation example. The complex interaction view casts unique constraints on the design of a humanoid, such as the whole body, smooth shape and non-functional-modular design. A brief description of ongoing design of ETL-humanoid which conforms to the above constraints is presented.