Humanoid as a research vehicle into flexible complex interaction

This paper considers the humanoid research as an approach to understanding and realizing complex real world interactions among the robot, environment, and human. As a first step towards extracting a common principle over the three term interactions, the concept of action oriented control has been investigated with simulation example. The complex interaction view casts unique constraints on the design of a humanoid, such as the whole body, smooth shape and non-functional-modular design. A brief description of ongoing design of ETL-humanoid which conforms to the above constraints is presented.