Behaviour-based physical agents as information display devices

摘要

This thesis studies the structural and behavioral design of the physical agents that can convey information to human through life-like body movements. These physical agents are natural and intuitive human-machine interfaces in social environment. The issues pertinent to behavior generation and expression on them are investigated. Based on the requirements and system components essential to the design and construction of the physical agents whose body structures are highly diversified due to their intended communication tasks, we have built three robotic puppets as human's avatars that make their bodies the instruments of expression. They take the structures of underconstrained wire-suspension mechanisms to solve the degrees of freedom problem. In order to make the motion generation process effective and flexible on the physical agents with different body structures, an agent-centered design approach that behavior generation and expression are founded on the motor capability is applied to the robotic puppets. The basic behavior modules are acquired from the mechanical structures of the robotic puppets and used as the innate behaviors that are helpful to generate illusion of life. Inspired biologically, the temporal and spatial aspects in movement synthesis are performed separately. As an answer to the correspondence problem, the multilevel behavior representation gives flexibility to motion transform while keeping the movements human-like. More complex behaviors independent from the underlying mechanical structure are synthesized from the motor primitives sequentially and concurrently. Coordination of full body movements is achieved though dynamically constraining the body parts in spatial symmetry. The demonstration shows that the robotic puppets have a diversity of body movements and enormous encoding potential in behavioral communication. This work not only achieves expressive movements on an unprecedented mechanism combining robotics with a type of traditional art form, but also provides an interesting testing bed for studying motor control and non-verbal communication.