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Takanori Jin

Publications and source records attributed to Takanori Jin.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

Multi-bounce Drum Roll with Optimized Active Tricks to Leverage Soft Embodiment

This paper presents a soft robotic drummer for accurate and efficient drum rolls. High-frequency drum rolls require the "multi-bounce technique," where a drumstick bounces multiple times with a single stroke. In robotic reproduction of this technique, the body's elasticity is key, while the fine motion during the stroke is also crucial for maximizing the potential of that elasticity. Therefore, we design two tricks: i) Tap-Pull (TP) trick to increase the number of rebounds by adding a pulling motion after impact; and ii) Micro-Pulse (MP) trick to keep the drumming volume by injecting small oscillations during the stroke. Due to the nonlinear complexity of soft embodiment, both tricks are efficiently tuned using Bayesian optimization in a data-driven manner for accomplishing the respective objectives quantified. We evaluated the optimized behaviors with soft and rigid end-effectors. As a result, the soft TP achieved the highest bounce count (12.25 per stroke) with uniform intervals. The soft MP suppressed the volume decay, yielding 6.8-times higher acoustic efficiency compared to the rigid MP. These results indicate that the proposed tricks with the combination of elasticity and optimization can make robots play excellent drum rolls.

cs.RO

Skin-Machine Interface with Multimodal Contact Motion Classifier

This paper proposes a novel framework for utilizing skin sensors as a new operation interface of complex robots. The skin sensors employed in this study possess the capability to quantify multimodal tactile information at multiple contact points. The time-series data generated from these sensors is anticipated to facilitate the classification of diverse contact motions exhibited by an operator. By mapping the classification results with robot motion primitives, a diverse range of robot motions can be generated by altering the manner in which the skin sensors are interacted with. In this paper, we focus on a learning-based contact motion classifier employing recurrent neural networks. This classifier is a pivotal factor in the success of this framework. Furthermore, we elucidate the requisite conditions for software-hardware designs. Firstly, multimodal sensing and its comprehensive encoding significantly contribute to the enhancement of classification accuracy and learning stability. Utilizing all modalities simultaneously as inputs to the classifier proves to be an effective approach. Secondly, it is essential to mount the skin sensors on a flexible and compliant support to enable the activation of three-axis accelerometers. These accelerometers are capable of measuring horizontal tactile information, thereby enhancing the correlation with other modalities. Furthermore, they serve to absorb the noises generated by the robot's movements during deployment. Through these discoveries, the accuracy of the developed classifier surpassed 95 %, enabling the dual-arm mobile manipulator to execute a diverse range of tasks via the Skin-Machine Interface. https://youtu.be/UjUXT4Z4BC8

cs.RO

Mirror-Descent Inverse Kinematics for Box-constrained Joint Space

To control humanoid robots, the reference pose of end effector(s) is planned in task space, then mapped into the reference joints by IK. By viewing that problem as approximate quadratic programming (QP), recent QP solvers can be applied to solve it precisely, but iterative numerical IK solvers based on Jacobian are still in high demand due to their low computational cost. However, the conventional Jacobian-based IK usually clamps the obtained joints during iteration according to the constraints in practice, causing numerical instability due to non-smoothed objective function. To alleviate the clamping problem, this study explicitly considers the joint constraints, especially the box constraints in this paper, inside the new IK solver. Specifically, instead of clamping, a mirror descent (MD) method with box-constrained real joint space and no-constrained mirror space is integrated with the Jacobian-based IK, so-called MD-IK. In addition, to escape local optima nearly on the boundaries of constraints, a heuristic technique, called $\epsilon$-clamping, is implemented as margin in software level. Finally, to increase convergence speed, the acceleration method for MD is integrated assuming continuity of solutions at each time. As a result, the accelerated MD-IK achieved more stable and enough fast tracking performance compared to the conventional IK solvers. The low computational cost of the proposed method mitigated the time delay until the solution is obtained in real-time humanoid gait control, achieving a more stable gait.

cs.RO