HERMES - A Humanoid Mobile Manipulator for Service Tasks
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FSR’97 International Conference on Field and Service Robots. Canberra, December 1997.
HERMES – A Humanoid Mobile Manipulator for Service Tasks
Rainer Bischoff
Federal Armed Forces University Munich
Institute of Measurement Science
Werner-Heisenberg-Weg 39, 85577 Neubiberg, Germany
E-Mail: Rainer.Bischoff@unibw-muenchen.de
Abstract HERMES – Humanoid Experimental Robot for Mobile Ma-
nipulation and Exploration Services – are presented.
To carry out automated service tasks at different
places within large working environments, a robot 1.1 Advantages of a Humanoid Robot Design
system able to navigate autonomously and to exe-
There are several reasons to take a human as an example for
cute commanded manipulation tasks is needed. In
the design of service robots. The best argument is that such a
this paper the design concept and the realization
robot shall perform its tasks in environments where humans
of a novel service robot named HERMES are de-
work and live, e.g., in apartments, offices, laboratories, res-
scribed. Its human-like appearance, highly inte-
taurants, or hospitals. These environments are designed to
grated sensors and actuators together with its
meet special human characteristics and needs: the space a
practical task-related intelligence enable the robot
human requires (e.g., the width of passageways and doors),
to perform various service tasks.
his working height (e.g., the height of tables or door knobs),
his vision height (e.g., the height of door plates) and his
1 Introduction strength that is needed to manipulate objects (e.g., to open
doors). If a robot is placed in such surroundings, it is to be
Service robots that have to operate in many different and
designed according to an anthropomorphic model and should
unstructured environments will be of great technological and
have comparable sensory and motor skills.
economical importance in the near future [Schraft et al.
Another important reason is that service robots have to
1994]. An important characteristic of such robots is that they
interact and to communicate with humans by different
have to work in environments that are co-habited by humans
means, from touch and gestures to speech. If a robot has a
who are not specially trained to co-operate with robots and
humanoid form and exhibits human-like behavior, humans
who are not necessarily interested in them. As a consequence
are able to interact in a more natural way [Brooks 1996].
future service robots will need a high degree of robustness,
Also, humanoid size and shape can be advantageous for
adaptability and advanced communication abilities in order
the representation of knowledge of the environment, because
to deal with unexpected situations. Such robots do not yet
the robot can develop human-like sorts of representations
exist.
[Johnson 1987].
To study the possibilities of realizing such robots we have
designed and constructed an experimental robot (Figure 1)
that possesses many of the characteristics that future service
1.2 Requirements for the robot HERMES
robots are expected to have. Its flexibility, modularity and The combination of autonomous navigation with skillful
extendability guarantee that diverse solutions to existing manipulation is a basic prerequisite for many service robots.
problems can be developed and validated in real-world ex- Therefore, HERMES should be able to explore unknown
periments. In the sequel the necessity for an anthropomor- environments in order to navigate therein and to manipulate
phic design is justified and our concept and the realization of diverse objects according to the given task. It should executeFSR, Canberra, December 1997 -2- Bischoff: Humanoid Mobile Manipulator HERMES
commands like “Take object O from bile manipulators. [Cameron et al.
the shelf in room 1, transport it to 1993] developed a mobile manipula-
room 2 and place it there on the tor that moved its arm in a favorable
table!”, without any special modifica- manipulation position during the
tions of the environment. Vision docking phase by reactive control
should be the main sensing modality, methods.
because it has proven to be most pow-
erful in such applications, not only 2.2 Humanoid Robots
with robots but also in nature [Graefe
The transition from mobile manipu-
1992]. The system architecture
lators to humanoid robots is not
should neither rely on exact world
clearly defined in the existing litera-
models nor on an exact knowledge of
ture. In the following a robot is called
optical, kinematical and dynamical
humanoid if it resembles – at least to
parameters. This leads to a high de-
some extend – a human in height,
gree of robustness that will allow
shape, configuration of its degrees of
autonomous operation of service ro-
freedom and both type and arrange-
bots in households and public areas
ment of its main sensors.
as well as in industrial environments.
[Bergener et al. 1997] have built a
robot that consists of a 7 DOF arm
2 State of the Art attached to TRC Labmate platform.
The robot head carries four cameras
Many laboratories work on the devel- with different focal lengths (two by
opment of components of autono- two) for navigation and manipulation
mous mobile systems. In most cases tasks.
research is focused on autonomy or Figure 1: Humanoid robot HERMES with omni- Several robots exist, mainly in the
mobility or manipulation. The inte- directional base, two arms, bendable body and two USA and in Japan, that have a more
gration of all three aspects into func- cameras on a pan-tilt platform; or less humanoid appearance; how-
tioning systems, mobile manipulators dimensions: 70 cm x 70 cm x 170 cm ever, it is not possible to describe
and humanoid robots, came only re- them all here. Although most of those
cently into the center of interest. In the sequel we give an systems are immobile, they possess several DOF in bodies,
overview of lately developed systems. Thereafter, project- manipulators and sensor heads, e.g. [Brooks, Stein 1993],
relevant work of our institute is described. [Konno et al. 1997].
The most sophisticated humanoids up to date are the
2.1 Mobile Manipulators walking robots P2 and P3 of Honda Motor Corporation. They
resemble closely a human in height, shape, configuration of
A mobile manipulator consists of a mobile platform with one its degrees of freedom. They are able to balance themselves
or more manipulators attached to it. The mobility achieved automatically if pushed, keep themselves upright according
by the platform yields a significantly enlarged work space to the angle of a slope, and climb stairs or slopes. These
compared to a fixed manipulator. However, the degrees of characteristics enable the robots to perform service tasks such
freedom (DOF) of the system are increased and the control of as pushing a cart and tightening bolts [Honda 1997].
the manipulator becomes more complex. All proposed solu-
tions for this problem have in common that they need te- 2.3 Project-Relevant Work at the Institute of Mea-
diously calibrated sensors and actuators, world models and surement Science
knowledge of the kinematic structures. Examples of impres-
Previous research work conducted at the Institute of Mea-
sive robots that have been realized based on these principles
surement Science with the mobile robots ATHENE I and
are, e.g., the assembly robot KAMRO [Lueth et al. 1995], the
ATHENE II and the manipulator “Mitsubishi Movemaster”
service robot ROMAN with a remarkable number of key
have been key to the design of HERMES.
components for service robots [Daxwanger et al. 1996] and
the rehabilitation robot MOVAID [Dario et al. 1995]. Mobility
[Yamamoto 1994] and [Khatib et al. 1995] have devel- ATHENE II (Figure 2) is a three wheeled vehicle with a
oped force control algorithms for multiple cooperating mo- monochrome video camera on a one-axis platform and a PCFSR, Canberra, December 1997 -3- Bischoff: Humanoid Mobile Manipulator HERMES
camera
camera gripper
object
Figure 3: manipulator “Mitsubishi Movemaster” with 5 DOF, two
finger gripper and stereo vision system
Figure 2: mobile robot ATHENE II with one-axis camera platform; mediate test movements. Meanwhile machine learning algo-
dimensions: 135 cm x 70 cm x 110 cm rithms have been employed, reducing the grasping time from
for both robot control and as host of a transputer frame grab- ca. 50 s to 10 s [Xie et al 1997].
ber used for image processing. On this robot a situation-ori-
ented, behavior-based approach for control and navigation 3 A New Design – Concepts and Requirements
has been developed and implemented [Wershofen 1996].
ATHENE II is able to navigate efficiently in a network of Some weaknesses and limitations of our institutes’ robots
corridors and open areas, i.e., drive to named locations and (e.g. insufficient maneuverability, too few degrees of freedom
execute directly specified sequences of behavior patterns. The and too little payload of the arm, a heterogeneous hard to
robot is able to acquire the necessary knowledge about the extend overall structure) made a complete redesign neces-
characteristics of the environment by supervised learning. sary. To open a wide field of possible experiments we have
3-D or 4-D world models are not necessary for neither situa- decided to realize an humanoid concept.
tion recognition nor execution of behavior patterns [Bischoff A strictly modular design where all modules have stan-
et al. 1996]. dardized, homogeneous mechanical and electrical interfaces
has been considered most important. If these modules are
Manipulation
connected via powerful communication links they can be
In general, an exact calibration of the optical parameters and
nearly arbitrarily configured and adapted to changing re-
the kinematics of the robot arm is needed for visually guided
quirements. This concept of modularity has been pursued
manipulation. This calibration is rather cumbersome and
both for the construction of the robot body and for the struc-
needs continuous verification, e.g., after any maintenance.
ture of the information processing system. This permits, on
To avoid these limitations, a new method was developed. It
the one side, to increase the degrees of freedom of the overall
has led to the realization of a calibration-free manipulator
system and, on the other side, to adapt the processing power
with 5 DOF, a two-finger gripper and a stereo vision system
by adding computational nodes if this should become neces-
(Figure 3). Flat and elongated cylindrical objects can be lo-
sary. Using established components a new robot can thus be
calized and grasped without any knowledge of kinematical or
created that is homogenous, flexible, easy to maintain and,
optical parameters; even arbitrary changes of the optical
most important, that can be controlled in all of its degrees of
system during manipulation are tolerated [Graefe, Ta 1995].
freedom in a uniform manner.
Basis for this extraordinary robustness is the absence of a
world coordinate system and a direct transition from image
3.1 Mobile Base
data to motor commands (control words), without using any
inverse perspective or kinematic transformations. In contrast Many service robots perform their tasks in environments
to other approaches (e.g. neural networks) no training is where humans can walk around without any problems. Most
required. of those environments have in common that they can be
The first implementations of the algorithm let the gripper accessed by wheeled vehicles. There are only few situations
approach the object in a sequence of single steps with inter- where legs could be advantageous, e.g., climbing stairs orFSR, Canberra, December 1997 -4- Bischoff: Humanoid Mobile Manipulator HERMES
stepping over obstacles. Therefore, we have chosen to equip
the robot base with wheels.
Ideally, our new robot should be able to move to those
places where humans can go; thus, it should not be larger
than a human. On the other side, it should run independently
from external power supplies and information processing for
a couple of hours. These two requirements are hard to meet
at the same time. An ideal solution could be a robot of cylin-
drical shape. However, this leads to an important reduction
of the loading capacity for batteries, computers and goods,
and it requires specially designed equipment. Therefore, we
voted for a quadratic base with a width of 60-70 cm. This
size exceeds the width of an average human by 10-20 cm, but
still guarantees the passage of doors and navigation in clut-
tered environments humans mostly work and live in.
Omnidirectional mobility is the most important require-
ment of the driving mechanism. This feature enables the
robot to negotiate narrow passages and to maneuver precisely
near objects that are to be manipulated.
3.2 Manipulation System
To manipulate arbitrarily positioned and oriented objects the Figure 4: Illustration of the enlarged work space gained by two
manipulation system needs at least six degrees of freedom. arms (6 DOF each) with two finger grippers, both attached to a
Since the optimal number of degrees of freedom and the bendable body; the hip joint and the camera platform accommodate
for favorable head-hand configurations
kinematic configuration as well as the type of end effector
will be determined in the course of our research the manipu-
Whereas humans have limited capabilities to manipulate
lator system should be assembled with standardized modules
behind their back our robot should not be restricted in any
that can be combined to form various kinematic chains.
way because of his different hip, shoulder and elbow joints as
According to the anthropomorphic model two arms
well as the agile sensor platform. Thus, the robot is enabled
should be used for the manipulation system in order to man-
to fulfil visually guided manipulation tasks behind its back,
age also sophisticated tasks, e.g., opening and passing doors
e.g., to place objects onto the loading space during periods of
that shut automatically. In addition, many aspects of cooper-
extended locomotion.
ating multi agent systems can be studied, e.g., picking up
objects that are too heavy for a single arm ([Lueth et al.
1995], [Khatib et al. 1995]). 3.3 Sensor System
Both picking up objects that lie on the ground and ma- Sensors are used to give feedback of both interior and exte-
nipulating objects that lie on tables or that are handed over rior states of the robot system and to supervise the current
by humans are of general interest. In principle, humans can interaction of its actuators with the environment. Similar to
pick up objects from the ground in two ways: They either humans the robot’s sensor system can be subdivided into
bend their torso or sink to their knees. Sinking to one’s knees exteroceptors and proprioceptors. Exteroceptors are excited
can be modeled by a linear drive, but that does not permit the or activated by stimuli from outside the organism (e.g. eye,
supervision of the grasping process from a sensor head ears, etc.) whereas proprioceptors relate to stimuli arising
placed above the shoulders. Therefore, we opted for a bend- within the body (e.g. of tendons, muscles and joints).
able body that brings both arms and sensor head in a favor-
able grasping position (Figure 4). Exteroceptors
Another advantage over a linear drive is the possibility to Key to the perception of the robot’s environment is a power-
manipulate objects that are far away from table borders, e.g., ful sensor system with the ability to change the focus of at-
in the center of a table. A “hip” joint that allows the robot to tention actively to desired directions. The design of an an-
bend over its torso at a height of 60-80 cm significantly in- thropomorphic robot requires a sensor head on a neck-like
creases the robot’s work space depending on the actual arm joint system placed on the shoulders. At the moment two
lengths and configurations of their degrees of freedom. degrees of freedom for the neck seem to be sufficient. This isFSR, Canberra, December 1997 -5- Bischoff: Humanoid Mobile Manipulator HERMES
due to the fact that humans use their third degree of freedom The lowest hierarchical level is formed by micro controllers
just in special cases, e.g., to read letters written sideways that control actuators and pre-process sensor data. Ideally,
more easily. these micro controllers should be connected via a standard-
The neck joint has to be placed and configured in such a ized bus because the communication with higher level infor-
way that the robot can directly observe the ground in front of mation processing becomes more effective.
itself. This helps to implement docking behaviors that visu-
ally adjust and optimize position and orientation of the ro- 3.5 Man-Machine Interface
bot’s body with respect to the docking station. The sensor The design of a man-machine interface has to be divided in
platform needs to be rotated by ± 180 ° to allow the robot to an interface for the developer of the robot software and an
look behind (e.g. to manipulate behind the back or to drive interface for the actual user. Basically, the developer needs
backwards guided by vision). multiple display options to be able to supervise and analyze
The sense of touch enables the robot to gain important the behavior of the robot whereas the actual user needs a
information for the manipulation of complex objects when comfortable interface specially adapted to his proper service
visual information is missing, insufficient or could easily be scenario. An efficient basis for a human-friendly interface is
misinterpreted. In a first step the robot should be equipped a behavior-based system architecture because it allows com-
with a sense of touch that allows detecting the exact location munication on a human-like level of abstraction [Graefe,
of collision with respect to the outer limits of the mobile Bischoff 1997].
base. This enables the robot to learn from incorrect behavior, An important aspect of both the developer’s interface and
that it exhibited, e.g., during navigation tasks. The grippers the safety concept is a manual robot control device (e.g., a
could use touch sensors, too, but we do not plan to integrate joystick) that lets the developer take over control from a safe
them during this first project phase. distance. This device must have the capability to control all
robot drives directly in order to free the robot from unwanted
Proprioceptors
or difficult situations and to bring it manually in predefined
The robot needs various internal sensors that give feedback configurations.
on its current internal state. Angle encoders on each drive
axis are most important to ensure coordinated motion con- 3.6 Safety Precautions
trol. Torque supervision and overload recognition seem to be
The robot should have tactile sensors and emergency swit-
of similar importance and could be realized by motor current
ches that disconnect all drives from the on-board power sup-
analysis. Additional sensors should inform about hardware
ply in case of danger. If only tactile sensors were used people
failures and the charging state of the battery.
would be nevertheless exposed to danger and equipment
could be damaged as the kinetic energy of the robot can be-
3.4 Information Processing and Robot Control come very high. Therefore, a safety concept must be devel-
Complex robotic systems depend on fast and reliable sensor oped and realized that early recognizes and reliably avoids
data processing as a basis for intelligent robot control. A dangerous situations. Such a concept has to be different from
decentralized and hierarchically structured multi-processor classical safety concepts for industrial robot settings where
system seems to be the best solution for such a demanding the work spaces of operator and robot are strictly separated.
task. Depending on the required computational power, data In sharp contrast, most service scenarios depend on a close
links, and available peripherical devices different types of interaction of operator and robot.
processors suggest themselves for each hierarchical level. Persons and objects sharing the work space of the robot’s
On the highest hierarchical level an operator should be manipulators are exposed to a special danger. Here, safety
able to enter tasks and supervise the whole system. A PC is can be enhanced by placing tactile sensors on the arm’s sur-
first choice to implement a human-friendly man-machine faces or by continuously predicting and verifying force and
interface because of the numerous peripherical input and torque on all joints.
output devices available. On the next hierarchical level oper-
3.7 Power Supply
ator commands are transferred to sensor-based actions of the
robot, i.e., motion commands for the mobile base, manipula- Decisive factors for the employment of service robots are a
tor system or sensor system. A homogeneous network of long autonomous working time and the decoupling of the
multiple digital signal processors seem to be adequate for information processing system from momentary voltage
this task because their computational power can be easily drops caused by abrupt charge changes. To efficiently de-
upgraded by adding more computational nodes as the com- velop programs a seamless switching between battery mode
plexity of the task or number of degrees of freedom increase. and external power mode is necessary. Separated emergencyFSR, Canberra, December 1997 -6- Bischoff: Humanoid Mobile Manipulator HERMES
switches for motors and information processing system position. It is easy to modify the
should allow fast and automated start up procedures after configuration of the undercar-
emergency stops. riage so that the active wheels
are on the left and right side of
4 Realization of HERMES the robot in order to test, e.g.,
differential drive concepts.
The humanoid robot HERMES can be described as a multi
robot system with 18 degrees of freedom. These degrees of 4.2 Manipulation System
freedom belong to an omnidirectional base (3 DOF), a ma- The manipulation system is
nipulation system (13 DOF), and a pan-tilt platform (2 DOF) mounted on top of the mobile
as sensor head. The manipulation system itself consists of platform (Figure 6). The arms
two arms with 6 DOF and two-finger gripper each, attached consist of a structure of double-
to a bendable body (1 DOF) (Figure 1). cube shaped turning modules
Central building blocks of the robot are compact drive that are connected through con-
modules that incorporate in double cubes powerful motor- ical and cylindrical linking ele-
gear combinations, the necessary power electronics, various ments, respectively. Two mod-
sensors (angle encoder, current converter, temperature sen- ules with an edge length of
sor), a micro controller for motion control and state supervi- 90 mm form the shoulder joint
sion and an intelligent bus interface (CAN) [amtec 1997]. that lacks one degree of free-
With these modules and various mechanical links and adapt- dom compared to humans. This
ers many different kinematic structures can be built. The missing degree of freedom can
electrical links for power and communication lines are real- be partly replaced by a rotation
ized by uniform cables and connectors along the kinematic of the mobile platform, or can Figure 6: manipulator with
chain of the robot structure. Communication is provided via be added later if it seems neces- six DOF and two finger
the proven CAN bus. The main characteristics of this bus sary. The next two modules gripper; length: 94 cm
system are high speed data transfer rates (1 Mbit/s), high with an edge length of 70 mm
insensitivity against noise, recognition and correction of form elbow and forearm. A wrist module with two degrees of
transfer errors, multi-master ability and a flexible bus topol- freedom and a gripper module complete the arm. The shoul-
ogy. der modules do not extend beyond the width of the undercar-
riage.
4.1 Omnidirectional Base Each arm has a mass of 14.2 kg and a payload of 2.0 kg
HERMES is built on a quadratic base of 60 cm x 60 cm, with (on a fully stretched out arm). By activating the modules’
an additional 5 cm bumper on each side (Figure 5). The brakes it is possible to exert much higher forces on objects, if
driving mechanism consists of four wheels that are placed in only the platform’s degrees of freedom are used (e.g., to open
the middle of each side. Two of the four wheels are powered doors).
and steered, the oth- The actual proportions of torso and arms yield a grasping
ers are passive cas- range of 120 cm (!) in front of the robot. The arms can also
ter wheels. Two mo- reach the rear part of the loading space. The hip module of
tors with a power of the bendable body is situated at a height of 70 cm. This al-
500 Watts each are lows for bending the body over tables in order to reach out
sufficient to acceler- for objects lying, e.g., in the center of the table. Even if body
ate the whole sys- and arms are fully stretched to the front the vehicle is still
tem at a rate of balanced because of the heavy and low-lying batteries which
1 m/s2 up to a speed yield a low center of gravity.
of 2 m/s. The omni-
directional driving
4.3 Sensor System
mechanism enables The camera platform consists of the same wrist module that
the robot to turn in is used for the arms. The pan axis with a maximum speed of
place and to move 180 °/s is placed on the shoulder and resembles the rotary
Figure 5: HERMES’ omnidirectional
mobile base with active (big) and passive in any direction degree of freedom of the human neck. The tilt axis (90 °/s)
(small) wheels, bumpers and batteries from the current compensates body movements during manipulation and isFSR, Canberra, December 1997 -7- Bischoff: Humanoid Mobile Manipulator HERMES
used to adjust the field of view
during navigation, e.g., to vi-
sually guide docking maneu-
vers.
Two monochrome video ca-
meras are used for gaining vi-
sual information. It is planned
to add two additional degrees
of freedom for vergence con-
trol and to actively control fo-
cal length and focus. Alterna-
tively, cameras with different
focal lengths could be used
simultaneously to fulfil the
different requirements of the
vision system during naviga-
tion and manipulation tasks.
Color cameras help to separate
objects from the background.
The proprioceptor system is
mainly integrated in the mod-
Figure 7: Modular and adaptable hardware architecture for information processing and robot control
ules: angle encoders, current
converters and temperature
sensors. Further external and internal sensor equipment will 4.5 Man-Machine Interface
be connected via CAN bus or digital and analogue I/O that
The developer’s and operator’s interfaces are realized under
are integrated in some of the modules (e.g., to measure bat-
Windows NT 4.0. Tasks can be transferred to the robot via a
tery charge or to realize a sense of touch).
wireless LAN. A manual robot control device acts as CAN
bus master and is able to control all branched modules and
4.4 Information Processing and Robot Control
subsystems using a joystick.
Figure 7 shows the hierarchical multi processor system: The
lowest level is built by the drive modules including their 4.6 Safety Precautions
integrated controllers, sensors and actuators. Each individual
To reduce the damaging effect of collisions the mobile plat-
module controls its motion and supervises its state according
form is surrounded by bumpers with integrated touch sensors
to commanded parameters.
allowing the detection of the point of collision. In the future,
The main load of information processing is based on a
errors of the robot leading to collisions should be analyzed
network of TMS 320C40 (“C40”) digital signal processors
and different avoidance strategies should be developed.
forming the second hierarchical level. This is where situation
If the robot, especially the manipulators, should run out
recognition, behavior selection, sensor data processing (in-
of control, an emergency switch at the rear of the undercar-
cluding image processing) and motion control on a higher
riage or at the manual robot control device can be pressed. A
level of abstraction takes place. Here, groups of modules as
2-D laser scanner will be integrated in the near future to
functional units (e.g. mobile platform) instead of single mod-
allow a robust obstacle detection.
ules are addressed.
At the moment two C40-based frame grabbers and one
4.7 Power Supply
computational node are used for image processing. One node
realizes overall control (including knowledge base manage- Power is supplied by five batteries which are integrated in
ment and host communication), and a C40-based CAN con- the free space of the mobile base. Four 12 V batteries in the
troller is used for actuator control and processing propriocep- corners of the platform are connected in series to provide
tor data. 48 V for the propulsion motors and 24 V for all other drives
A standard PC serves as host for the multi-processor and the information processing system. A fifth battery (24 V)
system and realizes the man-machine interface. is used to backup the processing system in case of voltageFSR, Canberra, December 1997 -8- Bischoff: Humanoid Mobile Manipulator HERMES
drops. In case of emergency all modules are disconnected Dario, P.; Guglielmelli, E.; Laschi, C.; Guadagnini, C.;
from the power supply. However, the backup battery still Pasquarelli, G.; Morana, G. (1995). MOVAID: a new Euro-
supplies the processing system allowing autonomous start up pean joint project in the field of Rehabilitation Robotics.
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Supply voltages for cameras and other sensors are provided r1.html, Arts Lab- Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna, Italy.
by DC/DC converters (5 V, 12 V). It is possible to switch Daxwanger, W.; Ettelt, E.; Fischer, C.; Freyberger, F.;
seamlessly between autonomous (battery) mode and external Hanebeck, U.; Schmidt, G. (1996). ROMAN: Ein mobiler
power mode. The capacity of the batteries is sufficient for Serviceroboter als persönlicher Assistent in belebten Innenräu-
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Graefe, V. (1992). Vision for Autonomous Mobile Robots.
5 Conclusions and Outlook IEEE Workshop on Advanced Motion Control. Nagoya, pp 57-
64.
Based on previously gained experience with work on mobile Graefe, V.; Ta, Q. (1995). An Approach to Self-Learning
robots and manipulators the humanoid robot HERMES has Manipulator Control Based on Vision. IMEKO Int. Symp. on
been designed and realized. The general concept of modular- Measurement and Control in Robotics. Smolenice, pp 409-414.
ity both on the structural and the information processing Graefe, V.; Bischoff, R. (1997). A Human Interface for an
level assures that HERMES can be used as a flexible and Intelligent Mobile Robot. To appear: 6th IEEE Int. Works. on
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believe that HERMES will enable us to work on many inter- Symposium of Robotics Research. Munich, October 1995.
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contribute valuable solutions to still unsolved problems in the Noda, T.; Inaba, M.; Inoue, H. (1997). Development of the
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