Work chain-based inverse kinematics of robot to imitate human motion with Kinect

Abstract

The ability to realize human-motion imitation using robots is closely related to developments in the field of artificial intelligence. However, it is not easy to imitate human motions entirely owing to the physical differences between the human body and robots. In this paper, we propose a work chain-based inverse kinematics to enable a robot to imitate the human motion of upper limbs in real time. Two work chains are built on each arm to ensure that there is motion similarity, such as the end effector trajectory and the joint-angle configuration. In addition, a two-phase filter is used to remove the interference and noise, together with a self-collision avoidance scheme to maintain the stability of the robot during the imitation. Experimental results verify the effectiveness of our solution on the humanoid robot Nao-H25 in terms of accuracy and real-time performance.