Special Seminar at NTU

The Joint Robotics Laboratory (JRL) is an international research unit jointly operated by the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) and the Japanese National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST). It is hosted at AIST in Tsukuba, Japan. For two decades, JRL has been designing humanoid robots and advancing their locomotion, manipulation, perception, and whole-body multi-contact task capabilities. Applications span industrial robotics, human interaction, and computational modeling. This presentation will provide a concise overview of the laboratory as a collaborative hub connecting researchers and faculty from France, Japan and beyond, across the broad field of robotics. It will also highlight selected recent achievements that have led to advanced demonstrations within collaborative projects on industrial manipulation, the use of humanoid robots as teleoperated avatars enabling remote human interaction, and assistive robotics.

The speaker has proposed the concept of “Human-Powered Robotics,” which is a new concept in human robot cooperative systems. In this concept, directly driven by the power supplied by a human operator, the servo clutch system controls the power flow by controlling the transmitted torque, and the integrated system controls the output motion. The basic technologies developed in the speaker's lab and several ongoing projects towards this concept will be introduced.