Eiichi Yoshida is Professor of Tokyo University of Science, at Department of Department of Medical and Robotic Engineering Design, Faculty of Advanced Engineering, since 2022. He received Ph. D degree from Graduate School of Engineering, the University of Tokyo in 1996. He then joined former Mechanical Engineering Laboratory, later in 2001 reorganized as National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST), Tsukuba, Japan. He served as Co-Director of AIST-CNRS JRL (Joint Robotics Laboratory) at LAAS-CNRS, Toulouse, France, from 2004 to 2008, and at AIST, Tsukuba, Japan from 2009 to 2021. He is Fellow of IEEE and received awards including Best Paper Award in Advance Robotics Journal, and the honor of national medal from French Government. His research interests include humanoid robotics, human modeling and task and motion planning for robots.
Modeling and Learning Contact-Rich Interactions for Humans and Humanoid
Recent advent of artificial intelligence and rapid progress on motion capacity of humanoid robots are bringing a strong attention expecting industrial and social applications. Despite their highly dynamic motion ability, humanoid robots need further improvements in motions involving contacts with all over their body. We humans generate such contact-rich motions with ease while solving the complex problem of combined discrete contact sequence and continuous dynamic motions is extremely hard. In this talk, I will present challenges in our ongoing research projects to address the following challenges: collecting whole-body contact motion data from humans, learning feature variables from those data and synthesizing multi-contact humanoid motions.