title: Cable-driven elastic parallel humanoid head with face tracking for Autism Spectrum Disorder interventions.
abstract: This paper presents the development of new prismatic actuation approach and its application in human-safe humanoid head design. To reduce actuator output impedance and mitigate unexpected external shock, the prismatic actuation method uses cables to drive a piston with preloaded spring. By leveraging the advantages of parallel manipulator and cable-driven mechanism, the developed neck has a parallel manipulator embodiment with two cable-driven limbs embedded with preloaded springs and one passive limb. The eye mechanism is adapted for low-cost webcam with succinct "ball-in-socket" structure. Based on human head anatomy and biomimetics, the neck has 3 degree of freedom (DOF) motion: pan, tilt and one decoupled roll while each eye has independent pan and synchronous tilt motion (3 DOF eyes). A Kalman filter based face tracking algorithm is implemented to interact with the human. This neck and eye structure is translatable to other human-safe humanoid robots. The robot's appearance reflects a non-threatening image of a penguin, which can be translated into a possible therapeutic intervention for children with Autism Spectrum Disorders.
authors.affiliation: Automation and Interventional Medicine (AIM) Laboratory in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, MA, USA. haosu@wpi.edu
authors.forename: Hao
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Su
authors.forename: Laurie
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Dickstein-Fischer
authors.forename: Kevin
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Harrington
authors.forename: Qiushi
authors.initials: Q
authors.lastname: Fu
authors.forename: Weina
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: Lu
authors.forename: Haibo
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Huang
authors.forename: Gregory
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Cole
authors.forename: Gregory S
authors.initials: GS
authors.lastname: Fischer
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D001185:Artificial Intelligence; D032701:Biomimetics / Q000295:instrumentation*; D002648:Child; D002659:Child Development Disorders, Pervasive / Q000628:therapy*; D005133:Eye Movements / Q000502:physiology; D005145:Face / Q000033:anatomy & histology* / Q000502:physiology; D006801:Humans; D007091:Image Processing, Computer-Assisted; D008953:Models, Anatomic; D010363:Pattern Recognition, Automated; D012371:Robotics