Designing Experiments for Children and Robots

The way in which a robot is presented to children can have a profound effect on their perception of its capabilities. A Poppy Humanoid robot was introduced to 43 children (aged 7-9) either as a robot that needed programming or as a member of the team which needed to learn. The children were asked to write down three actions they believed that the robot could complete. Thematic analysis was then used to categorise the data. When the robot was not humanised, 71% of the suggestions were about completing a physical action or sequence of actions and 14% required the robot to exhibit intelligence or learning. When humanised, 39% of the actions were physical and 35% were categorised as intelligent. Introducing the robot as human captured emotional and appearance actions not otherwise present

Finger readjustment algorithm for object manipulation based on tactile information

This paper presents a novel algorithm which registers pressure information from tactile sensors installed over the fingers of a robotic hand in order to perform manipulation tasks with objects. This algorithm receives as an input the joint trajectories of the fingers which have to be executed and adapts it to the real contact pressure of each finger in order to guarantee that undesired slippage or contact‐breaking is avoided during the execution of the manipulation task. This algorithm has been applied not only for the manipulation of normal rigid bodies but also for bodies whose centre of mass can be changed during the execution of the manipulation task.The research leading to the results presented in this paper has been funded by the research projects DPI2008‐02647and DPI2011‐22766 of the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation and by the research project GRE10‐16 of the University of Alicante. This research has also received funding from the European Community’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007‐2013) under Grant Agreement no. 231640 and the research project HANDLE