Anthropomorphism as a pervasive design concept for a robotic assistant

CORA is a robotic assistant whose task is to collaborate with a human operator on simple manipulation or handling tasks. Its sensory channels comprising vision, audition, haptics, and force sensing are used to extract perceptual information about speech, gestures and gaze of the operator, and object recognition. The anthropomorphic robot arm makes goal-directed movements to pick up and hand over objects. The human operator may mechanically interact with the arm by pushing it away (haptics) or by taking an object out of the robot´s gripper (force sensing). The design objective has been to exploit the human operator´s intuition by modeling the mechanical structure, the senses, and the behaviors of the assistant on human anatomy, human perception, and human motor behavior.