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Sticky Hands

'Sticky Hands' is a popular exercise in Tai Chi circles. By maintaining a gentle contact with a partner while moving, participants develop physical sensitivity to their partner's motions. A graceful, relaxed and responsive style of motion results. It is thus a physical exercise but is regarded by many as a form of spiritual development where participants may cooperatively explore a physical interaction with a mutual goal.

The project was conducted in collaboration with the Human Information Science Laboratories at ATR in Japan, and Dr Frank Pollick of the Psychology Department, University of Glasgow . It involved implementing a system for playing the game with a humanoid robot. This places the robot in a new social role as a playmate or partner for a human's self-development. We hoped that this would encourage people to feel comfortable interacting physically and cooperatively with robots, and to perceive them more as living beings than mechanical entities. The papers discuss ways of augmenting the robot's body motion to mimic human like style, and express emotion.

In order to play the game, the robot attempts to maintain contact with its human partner's hand using minimum force. The point of contact is continually observed and paths recorded. The robot learns contact point trajectories and is capable of generalising observed paths for the prediction of new and different paths. In this way it may synchronise its motions with those of the human while permitting the paths to evolve freely over time. The learning algorithm records instantaneous samples of the trajectory and stores them in a voxel array. It operates with parameterisable time and memory bounds.

The following media related to the project are available:

• Tai Chi Sifu Rodney Berry demonstrates the exercise with a human partner ( QT Video 6.6MB )
• The robot plays with a human ( QT Video 9MB )
• Poster summarising the project ( PDF 0.5MB )

This research is part of our work in the Cyberhuman Project centred in ATR (Kyoto, Japan). The system was developed with the assistance of Dr Frank Pollick from the Department of Psychology, University of Glasgow.

There are a number of papers related to this work:

• J.G. Hale & F.E. Pollick: "Sticky Hands" interaction with an anthropomorphic robot , 2000 Workshop on Interactive Robotics and Entertainment (WIRE-2000), Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, April 30 - May 1, 2000
• C.G. Atkeson, J.G. Hale, S. Kotosaka, F.E. Pollick,M. Riley, S. Schaal, T. Shibata: Using a Humanoid Robot to Study Human Motor Control , IEEE Intelligent Systems Special Issue on Humanoids, July 2000
• J.G. Hale & F.E. Pollick: Playing 'Sticky Hands' With A Humanoid Robot , First IEEE-RAS International Conference on Humanoid Robots (Humanoids 2000), Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Boston, September 7 - 8, 2000

Last Update 10th March 2006
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