AUTONOMOUS LIMB CONTROL FOR INFORMATION PROCESSING ROBOTS - LIMB CONTROL SYSTEM FOR THE ROBOT MUSICIAN 'WABOT-2'.

The purpose of this study is to realize 'soft' functions of robots such as dexterity, speediness and intelligence by the development of an anthropomorphic intelligent robot playing keyboards instrument. This paper describes the development of keyboard playing robot WABOT-2 (WAseda roBOT-2) with a focus on the mechanisms of 4 limbs and their control system. This robot has two arms with 5 fingers each, and two legs for pedaling, totaling 50 degrees of freedom (DOF). There is no precedent for the development of the robot system with such many DOF, and synthesis of computer system capable of efficient control of those multi-degrees of freedom emerges as a big problem. And, it is also the most important for this automatic limb control system, to own the capability to produce the trajectories of 4 limbs from the score information input. To deal with above problems, the computer system of the WABOT-2's limb control system is hierarchically structured by three levels with 53 micro-processors. The top level processes the musical score information, and the processing flow can be divided into two steps. First, by using a problem solving method of artificial intelligence, fingering and wrist positions are determined according to the score data sent from the vision system. Second, the trajectories of fingers, arms and legs are planned. These processes are based on three types of knowledge; object, work and the specifications of the robot.