A Beach Ball Volley Playing Robot with a Human

Abstract

It is expected that robots will work in homes and hospitals with humans in the future. We have developed a beach ball volley playing robot as a demonstration of human friendly robot technology. Our developed robot has the following three functions for a human friendly robot: 1) to interact with a robot using everyday words, such as “Let's play volleyball”, “Pick up a ball”, 2) to move under visual feedback by measuring a target position, and 3) to control arm motions which are expressed by using dynamic equations for performing tasks. This paper describes structures and procedures of the robot system.