French Robots in Korea
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Rhoban Project - French Pavilion - Yeosu Expo 2012

Rhoban Project, in collaboration with Flowers team shows its robots in the French pavilion of the international expo 2012 of Yeosu, Korea. Every day from 2012.05.12 to 2012.08.12. Over this period, around 1 million visitors are expected in the pavilion, 8 millions in the whole expo. Rhoban Project is a group mixing academic researchers, artists and others people interested in designing original 
robotic creatures. Have a look here.

The show presents the work of the project about humanoid robots. The main question that we explore is
compliance / soft motor control. Indeed, usually a robot is controlled "in position": this means that the angle of each joint of the robot is computed for any time; and at any time, each joint takes this angle whatever force/energy it needs and whatever obstacle it meets. The robot is stiff. By several aspects, this method has been proved to be very efficient in the industry world (precision, repeatability, power). However, it becomes less adapted when one wants to make robots go out of the context of factories. This is the case if we think to personal robotic, where the robot works at home among people, or interventions on a disaster site: the environment of the robot is not known in advance in these applications.

Taking that into account, we design soft robots, like animals, and like human in particular. This allows the robot to handle partially or completely unknown environments
. Soft joints adapt by themselves their own positions in order to fit the environment and perturbations. In this way they look and construct by themselves unplanified stable states or trajectories for the robot - motor intelligence -. Thanks to compliance, animals enforce locomotion in an unequalled efficient and robust way; we try to imitate that.

Compliance/softness allows also the robot to learn from human. Indeed, the softness of joints allows physical interaction between the human and the robot.
The user can manipulate directly the robot in order to show him new motions; and the robot, while performing some other things (like balance keeping for instance), can learn from people new motor behaviours. Thanks to compliance, its motor system remains "open" to its environment. Such interaction is also a privileged way to enforce collaborative tasks between humans and robots like typically transporting heavy charges.

Also, we designed an anthropomorphic arm of real size. It has 7 principal joints plus a hand with several degrees of freedom (4 to 12). Our design relies on low cost elements in order to fit cost constraints in view of large public deployment. This implies a low precision and a low power. For that, we use elastics and springs to reduce backlash and as energy accumulators.

We explore softness at different levels of robotic design:
 
mechatronic control: how the motors must be controlled by electronic and software in order to give a soft behaviour to a joint.

- morphology. Morphology is crucial for many tasks, and especially locomotion. The motor behavior, and in particular the stability of the robot depends directly on its morphology. The morphology of our humanoid robots are highly inspired by the one of the human: it is particularly original for the vertebral column of Acroban which is designed according to physiology studies emphasizing the essential joints of the human vertebral column. Together with the pelvis, this allows very subtle motions close to human.

- mechanics. We explore the use of compliant materials (plastics, elastics, silicone, springs) in order to add natural flexibility to the robot, like does the cartilage for animals. We also design a linear free joint in the hip, controlled by a damper, which is new in humanoid robotics. This makes the robot semi-passive as this joint only reacts mechanically to environment without any specific control.
Compliant and flexible mechanical elements absorb shocks, and also behave as energy accumulators.

The Rhoban System robots in the French Pavillion.

Our robots have been chosen to animate the third room of the Expo’2012 french pavilion, this room is called “the cellular garden”. Our robotic installation is a symbol of harmony between nature and high technology. We are happy to use this opportunity to show our robotic skills and entertain the french pavilion visitors.
  • The small humanoid robot SigmaBan (which usually plays soccer :-) ) doing tree swing while Acroban pushes him. This installation shows how our robots can interact physically thanks to soft control. Indeed, the arms and the spine of Acroban are compliant, which allows him to feel the swing and pushing it on time while keeping balance. 

  • Then another Acroban performs some dances and sometime interacts with people, who can takes his hands and play with him.

  • Finally, the dance of Acroban is accompanied by a funny show performed by 5 pairs of real size anthropomorphic arms who seems to play rock music !... Each arm has 11 degres of freedom, including 4 articulated fingers. The arms reproduce the human morphology. This is the Rhoban Sound System :
The Rhoban Sound System Show

The robotic arms are a rockband called “Rhoban Sound System”, developped by our company “Rhoban System” with two goals in mind: provide an entertaining show to the visitors while at the same time ensuring reliability of the installation.

The Rhoban Sound system Band plays every ten minutes, twelve hours a day, seven days a week for three months! Albeit ensuring reliability of entertainment robots for such a long time is a hard task, this challenge was succesfully underscored by the Rhoban Team.

The creation of the musical show has required two challenging developpment tasks: create the robotic arms as well as adequate software tools to animate the arms. There are five pairs of anthropomorphic arms with eleven joints and four animated fingers. Our software system performs an analysis of the piece of music and extracts from it the ryhtm and melody, which in turn are used to generate a first set of robotic moves. Then the Rhoban System team adds extra entertaining moves to get as a result an unforgettable rock’n’roll show!
Cellular garden

The cellular garden: the robot show room

    Medias

    KBS morning news (main Korean national TV channel) 2012.07.26 :




    KBS 2012.07.28 :









Overview of the show





Details of the hand
(the hands have been designed by using and extending techniques initiated by Rob Knight)
concert !

Anthropomorphic arms with visitors

anthropomorphic arms


interaction

Interaction with people



Look also at some other pictures here.

Contacts : Olivier Ly - Hugo Gimbert

All the robots have been designed by the Rhoban Team

Thanks to Pol Desmurs for music, and thanks to the french pavillon team, for help and support.

Supports: Rhoban System - LaBRI - CNRS - INRIA - Bordeaux University - Région Aquitaine - COFRES

Pavillon France