Robot Head Motion Control with an Emphasis on Realism of Neck-Eye Coordination during Object Tracking

Important aspects of present-day humanoid robot research is to make such robots look realistic and human-like, both in appearance, as well as in motion and mannerism. In this paper, we focus our study on advanced control leading to realistic motion coordination for a humanoid's robot neck and eyes while tracking an object. The motivating application for such controls is conversational robotics, in which a robot head actor should be able to detect and make eye contact with a human subject. Therefore, in such a scenario, the 3D position and orientation of an object of interest in space should be tracked by the redundant head-eye mechanism partly through its neck, and partly through its eyes. In this paper, we propose an optimization approach, combined with a real-time visual feedback to generate the realistic robot motion and robustify it. We also offer experimental results showing that the neck-eye motion obtained from the proposed algorithm is realistic comparing to the head-eye motion of humans.