Researchers Conduct Research to Enable Robots to Move Like Humans

Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology are conducting a research on enabling robots to move in a more human-like fashion where one movement leads to another.

This study is aimed at helping people to identify the robot’s actions, and also mimic it themselves. Details of the research will be presented on March 7, 2011 at the Human-Robot Interaction conference in Lausanne, Switzerland.

Andrea Thomaz, assistant professor in the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech’s College of Computing along with Ph.D. student Michael Gielniak, carried out a study concerning the  robot’s action by allowing people to watch its movements.

The team by Thomaz and Gielniak has developed a robot, the Simon, to mimic a series of movements taken in a motion-capture lab. In an attempt to bring about more human-like movements, they have optimized Simon to enable simultaneous movement of several joints. In future, the duo plan on enabling Simon to perform the same movements in various ways.