SpringerLink
Log in

Humanoid robot magic show performance

  • Published:
Multimedia Tools and Applications Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

Recent advances in humanoid robotics have opened up many new directions for humanoid robotics research. Multimedia and arts are applications with significant growth opportunities. In this paper, we introduce magic shows as a benchmark and research problem for humanoid robots and discuss our flexible and versatile system architecture. The goal is to have a humanoid robot perform as a magician in front of an audience. Note that we focus on magic performances that require complex manipulation and interaction of the robot instead of tricks where the robot is passive and used mainly as a prop. So in our tricks, the magic is critically dependent on the skills of the humanoid robot. Furthermore, a successful magic show requires that the robot interacts meaningfully and goal directed with the audience. We describe the technical details of a pen and drawing magic trick, the human-robot collaboration, hardware architecture, and software architecture of our system. One interesting aspect of our system is the inclusion of various personalities for the robot magician. Overall, the robot performed the magic tricks well in the competition and won third place at the IEEE IROS Humanoid Application Challenge(HAC) 2019 in Macau.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Subscribe and save

Springer+ Basic
EUR 32.99 /Month
  • Get 10 units per month
  • Download Article/Chapter or Ebook
  • 1 Unit = 1 Article or 1 Chapter
  • Cancel anytime
Subscribe now

Buy Now

Price includes VAT (Brazil)

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Fig. 1
Fig. 2
Fig. 3
Fig. 4
Fig. 5
Fig. 6
Fig. 7
Fig. 8
Fig. 9
Algorithm 1
Fig. 10
Fig. 11
Fig. 12

Similar content being viewed by others

References

  1. Baltes J (2000) A benchmark suite for mobile robots. In: Proceedings. 2000 IEEE/RSJ international conference on intelligent robots and systems (IROS 2000) (Cat. No.00CH37113), vol. 2, pp 1101–11062, DOI https://doi.org/10.1109/IROS.2000.893166, (to appear in print)

  2. Baltes J, Sadeghnejad S, Seifert D, Behnke S (2014) Robocup humanoid league rule developments 2002–2014 and future perspectives. In: Robot Soccer World Cup, Springer, pp 649–660

  3. Baltes J, Tu K-Y, Sadeghnejad S, Anderson J (2017) Hurocup: competition for multi-event humanoid robot athletes. Knowl Eng Rev 32:E1

    Article  Google Scholar 

  4. Baltes J, Sun Y, Moon H (2018) 2017 competitions: magical, manipulating, mercurial robots [competitions]. IEEE Robot Autom Mag 25(2):8–15

    Article  Google Scholar 

  5. Baltes J (2019) [CFP Robot Magic IROS 2019] IEEE IROS 2019 humanoid application challenge - robot magic and music

  6. Bradski G, Kaehler A (2008) Learning OpenCV: computer vision with the OpenCV Library. O’Reilly Media, Inc.

  7. Causer C (2019) Disney tech: immersive storytelling through innovation. IEEE Potentials 38(5):10–18

    Article  Google Scholar 

  8. Cobb-Clark DA, Schurer S (2012) The stability of big-five personality traits. Econ Lett 115(1):11–15

    Article  Google Scholar 

  9. Gerndt R, Seifert D, Baltes JH, Sadeghnejad S, Behnke S (2015) Humanoid robots in soccer: Robots versus humans in robocup 2050. IEEE Robot Autom Mag 22(3):147–154

    Article  Google Scholar 

  10. Goldberg LR (1993) The structure of phenotypic personality traits. Am Psychol 48(1):26

    Article  Google Scholar 

  11. Huggins-Daines D, Kumar M, Chan A, Black AW, Ravishankar M, Rudnicky AI (2006) Pocketsphinx: a free, real-time continuous speech recognition system for hand-held devices. In: 2006 IEEE international conference on acoustics speech and signal processing proceedings, vol. 1, IEEE

  12. Iverach-Brereton C, Winton A, Baltes J (2012) Ice skating humanoid robot. In: Conference towards autonomous robotic systems, Springer, pp 209–219

  13. Iverach-Brereton C, Baltes J, Anderson J, Winton A, Carrier D (2014) Gait design for an ice skating humanoid robot. Robot Auton Syst 62(3):306–318

    Article  Google Scholar 

  14. Jeong J, Yang J, Baltes J (2020) Robot magic show: human–robot interaction. Knowl Eng Rev 35:E15

    Article  Google Scholar 

  15. Jeong J, Yang J, Baltes J (2022) Robot magic show as testbed for humanoid robot interaction. Entertain Comput 40:100456

    Article  Google Scholar 

  16. Juang L-H (2021) Humanoid robots play chess using visual control. Multimed Tools Appl 81:1545–1566

    Article  Google Scholar 

  17. Kazemi V, Sullivan J (2014) One millisecond face alignment with an ensemble of regression trees. In: Proceedings of the IEEE conference on computer vision and pattern recognition, pp 1867–1874

  18. Kirtane L, Libby K, Touretzky DS (2004) Aibo’s magic looking glass: Human-robot interaction mediated by a detached display

  19. Koretake R, Kaneko M, Higashimori M (2014) The robot that can achieve card magic. In: 2014 IEEE/ASME international conference on advanced intelligent mechatronics, IEEE, pp 1249–1254

  20. Kuo-Yang T, Hong-Yu L, You-Ru L, Che-** H, Baltes J (2020) First human–robot archery competition: a new humanoid robot challenge. Knowl Eng Rev 35:E22

    Article  Google Scholar 

  21. Lin C-Y, Tseng C-K, Teng W-C, Lee W-C, Kuo C-H, Gu H-Y, Chung K-L, Fahn C-S (2009) The realization of robot theater: humanoid robots and theatric performance. In: 2009 international conference on advanced robotics, IEEE, pp 1–6

  22. Morris KJ, Samonin V, Anderson J, Lau MC, Baltes J (2018) Robot magic: a robust interactive humanoid entertainment robot. In: International conference on industrial, engineering and other applications of applied intelligent systems, Springer, pp 245–256

  23. Morris KJ, Samonin V, Baltes J, Anderson J, Lau MC (2019) A robust interactive entertainment robot for robot magic performances. Appl Intell 49(11):3834–3844

    Article  Google Scholar 

  24. Moon H, Sun Y, Baltes J, Kim SJ (2017) The iros 2016 competitions [competitions]. IEEE Robot Autom Mag 24(1):20–29

    Article  Google Scholar 

  25. Paetzel M, Hofer L (2019) The robocup humanoid league on the road to 2050 [competitions]. IEEE Robot Autom Mag 26(4):14–16

    Article  Google Scholar 

  26. Pasquali D, Gonzalez-Billandon J, Rea F, Sandini G, Sciutti A (2021) Magic icub: a humanoid robot autonomously catching your lies in a card game. In: Proceedings of the 2021 ACM/IEEE international conference on human-robot interaction, pp 293–302

  27. PYTTSX3 https://pypi.org/project/pyttsx3/

  28. Roccetti M, Marfia G, Zanichelli M (2010) The art and craft of making the tortellino: playing with a digital gesture recognizer for preparing pasta culinary recipes. Comput Entertain (CIE) 8(4):1–20

    Article  Google Scholar 

  29. Rosner D, Roccetti M, Marfia G (2014) The digitization of cultural practices. Commun ACM 57(6):82–87

    Article  Google Scholar 

  30. Shangari TA, Shamshirdar F, Heydari MH, Sadeghnejad S, Baltes J, Bahrami M (2015) Aut-uofm humanoid teensize joint team; a new step toward 2050’s humanoid league long term roadmap. In: Robot intelligence technology and applications 3, Springer, pp 483–494

  31. Singh G, Banga V (2022) Robots and its types for industrial applications, vol 60, pp 1779–1786

  32. Suzuki S, Inooka H (1997) Golf-swing robot emulating a human motion. In: Proceedings 6th IEEE international workshop on robot and human communication. RO-MAN’97 SENDAI, IEEE, pp 28–33

  33. Tebbe J, Gao Y, Sastre-Rienietz M, Zell A (2018) A table tennis robot system using an industrial kuka robot arm. In: German conference on pattern recognition, Springer, pp 33–45

  34. Williams H, McOwan PW (2014) Magic in the machine: a computational magician’s assistant. Front Psychol 5:1283

    Article  Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgements

This work was financially supported by the “Chinese Language and Technology Center” of National Taiwan Normal University (NTNU) from The Featured Areas Research Center Program within the framework of the Higher Education Sprout Project by the Ministry of Education (MOE) in Taiwan, and Ministry of Science and Technology, Taiwan, under Grants no. MOST 111-2918-I-003-003-, MOST 110-2923-E-003-001-MY3, and MOST 110-2221-E-003-023. We are grateful to the National Center for High-performance Computing for computer time and facilities to conduct this research.

Author information

Author notes

    Authors and Affiliations

    1. Department of Electrical Engineering, National Taiwan Normal University, He** East Road, Taipei, 10610, Taiwan

      Jeehyun Yang, Jaesik Jeong & Jacky Baltes

    2. Department of Electrical Engineering, Politeknik Negeri Batam, Batam, 29461, Indonesia

      Eko Rudiawan Jamzuri

    Authors
    1. Jeehyun Yang
      View author publications

      You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

    2. Jaesik Jeong
      View author publications

      You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

    3. Eko Rudiawan Jamzuri
      View author publications

      You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

    4. Jacky Baltes
      View author publications

      You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

    Corresponding author

    Correspondence to Jaesik Jeong.

    Ethics declarations

    Conflict of Interests

    The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

    Additional information

    Publisher’s note

    Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

    Jeehyun Yang, Jaesik Jeong, and Eko R. Jamzuri are contributed equally to this work.

    Rights and permissions

    Springer Nature or its licensor (e.g. a society or other partner) holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law.

    Reprints and permissions

    About this article

    Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

    Cite this article

    Yang, J., Jeong, J., Jamzuri, E.R. et al. Humanoid robot magic show performance. Multimed Tools Appl 82, 34609–34630 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-023-14690-w

    Download citation

    • Received:

    • Revised:

    • Accepted:

    • Published:

    • Issue Date:

    • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-023-14690-w

    Keywords

    Search

    Navigation