Interactive hand/eye coordination between a human and a humanoid-a proposal

This research concerns the development of a binocular computer vision system for a robotic humanoid using interactive hand/eye coordination as a focus for skills teaching and capability demonstrations. The humanoid form aids natural transference of sophisticated human skills of perception, spatial reasoning, sensor guided manipulation and person-to-person communications (eye contact, body language, speech, touch etc.) to the robot and simultaneously stimulates considerations of human centred applications requiring such skills. This research builds on a humanoid project undertaken within the Intelligent Robotics Research Centre at Monash University and funded internally in 1999. At this early stage of the project much of the material presented in this paper is speculative and part of the planning for an extended piece of research over a number of years.