Development of street performance robot “SOMENOSUKE”

This paper reports the development of a street performance robot "SOMENOSUKE" which mimics Japanese traditional juggling "KUWAEBACHI". In this performance, an entertainer holds a drumstick in his/her mouth and then balances an object such as a ball or a teapot on it with great concentration. By considering this trick as a kind of visual feedback control by humans, we develop a robot having a rotating arm with a USB camera. To compensate the delay and the low sampling rate in the visual sensing system, we design a feedback controller based on the sampled-data H^∞ control theory. By considering the addition of blocks as the uncertainty, we achieve the robust stabilization. The performance of our robot is illustrated with experimental data.