Deep Neural Network Approach in Human-like Redundancy Optimization for Anthropomorphic Manipulators

Human-like behavior has emerged in the robotics area for improving the quality of HumanRobot Interaction (HRI). For the human-like behavior imitation, the kinematic mapping between a human arm and robot manipulator is one of the popular solutions. To fulfill this requirement, a reconstruction method called swivel motion was adopted to achieve human-like imitation. This approach aims at modeling the regression relationship between robot pose and swivel motion angle. Then it reaches the human-like swivel motion using its redundant degrees of the manipulator. This characteristic holds for most of the redundant anthropomorphic robots. Although artificial neural network (ANN) based approaches show moderate robustness, the predictive performance is limited. In this paper, we propose a novel deep convolutional neural network (DCNN) structure for reconstruction enhancement and reducing online prediction time. Finally, we utilized the trained DCNN model for managing redundancy control a 7 DoFs anthropomorphic robot arm (LWR4+, KUKA, Germany) for validation. A demonstration is presented to show the human-like behavior on the anthropomorphic manipulator. The proposed approach can also be applied to control other anthropomorphic robot manipulators in industry area or biomedical engineering.