Understand human tool-use in motion and contact for robotic tooling

2020 Fiscal Year Final Research Report

• Project/Area Number: 18K18130
• Research Category: Grant-in-Aid for Early-Career Scientists
• Allocation Type: Multi-year Fund
• Review Section: Basic Section 61050:Intelligent robotics-related
• Research Institution: NTT Communication Science Laboratories (2019-2020); Tokyo Institute of Technology (2018)
• Principal Investigator: Takagi Atsushi 日本電信電話株式会社NTTコミュニケーション科学基礎研究所, 人間情報研究部, 特別研究員 (70802362)
• Project Period (FY): 2018-04-01 – 2021-03-31
• Keywords: interaction robot / motor control / motor adaptation

Outline of Final Research Achievements

Even the most advanced robots are nowhere close to achieving the speed or robustness of human workers, especially when contact with the environment is necessary to the task like fitting an object into a hole. We analyzed human strategies when inserting a tool or peg into a hole, and attempted to replicate the strategy to develop a new robot for contact tasks.

Free Research Field

計算論的脳科学

Academic Significance and Societal Importance of the Research Achievements

With the population rapidly declining in Japan, there is a need to automate the workforce. Our study revealed the key planning process enabling humans to rapidly complete interaction tasks, thereby pushing us one step closer to realizing interaction robots capable of rapidly assembling components.