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Life-size humanoids which have the same joint arrangement as humans are expected to help in the living environment. In this case, they require high load operations such as gripping and conveyance of heavy load, and holding people at the care spot. However, these operations are difficult for existing humanoids because of their low joint output. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to develop the...
Human knee joint has a yaw-axis rotational DOF and a locking mechanism called screw-home mechanism. We focus on this mechanism and implement it to a musculoskeletal humanoid through hardware design. The importance of developing a knee joint with screw-home mechanism is that such a joint is capable of working yaw-axis properly and generating enough pitch joint torque for supporting whole body motion...
This paper presents a design methodology for humanoid upper limb based on human anatomy. Kenshiro is a full body tendon driven humanoid robot and is designed from the data of average 14 year old Japanese boy. The design of his upper limb is realizing detail features of muscles, bones and the adhesive relation of the two. Human mimetic design is realized by focusing on the fact that joints are being...
Many robots need body calibrations when their physical parameters are changed. This is because their motions are created with absolute variables such as links position and orientation. In this paper, we propose two methods using the musculoskeletal humanoid Kojiro. First, we apply a body control method with a Jacobian map between muscle space and work space, which is made with relative variables....
High-powered humanoid robots are expected that it can move at a high speed in the same environment as human. In that case, when they receive shocks suddenly, instantaneous impact is applied to the structure of the feet and they can be broken. So, robots require shock-reduction mechanisms. In this paper, we consider a high-powered elastic humanoid robot and we propose a mechanism to make a hybrid leg,...
We have developed and studied musculoskeletal humanoids. Our goal is to realize a more human-like humanoid as a real human simulator, which has the same muscle and joint arrangements as human's and can do natural and dynamic motions as well as humans. Especially, it is very challenging to design musculoskeletal structure which can contain a large number of high powered muscles. Now, we design new...
A walking biped robot is required to change its walking direction and speed with minimal delay and not to tip off even when subjected to an unexpected external force. A major drawback of Zero Moment Point (ZMP) based online walking pattern generation methods is that arbitrary ZMPs cannot be achieved without divergence of the Conter of Mass (CoM). In this paper, we propose a new online walking trajectory...
In order to know human dynamics, humanoid as a human body simulator is increasing its importance. Such humanoid is expected to have human musculoskeletal structure as close as possible. From this viewpoint, we are trying to create new musculoskeletal humanoid which has detailed human imitating structure, such as bi-articular muscle, muscle arrangement, joint structure and so on. In this paper, we...
We have been developing and studying musculoskeletal humanoids. Our goal is to realize more human-like humanoids which can do natural and dynamic motions as well as humans. Especially motions with complex contact with environments, which is jumping, running, catching a ball, and landing on one's hands, etc, are difficult to be achieved by humanoids. To achieve that motions, robots have to absorb shock...
Our laboratory has tackled the composition theory approach of clarifying the structure in the human body by imitating it. Focusing on the hip joint, which has many complex muscle groups, we estimated and implemented 15 muscles to restrict the hip joint. However, it was difficult to implement such a quantity muscles to musculoskeletal humanoid because motor space is limited and the frame must have...
We are trying to create a novel musculoskeletal humanoid robot which has a humanlike structure. In this paper, we present a new knee joint which is usually simplified in robotics for high controllability. The knee joint has three human mimetic points, patella, screw-home mechanism and four-linked linkage. Patella is for a longer moment arm. Screw-home mechanism is for locking knee joint. Four-linked...
In recent years, humanlike robots have recieved a lot of attension. For making humanlike robots, a muscu-loskeletal humanoid is an effective approach. However, many musculoskeletal humanoids have not yet been equipped with really humanlike bones and muscles, especially for the body trunk, which is the core of the robot. For making a powerful and lithe humanoid body trunk with really humanlike bones...
We have developed and studied musculoskeletal humanoids. Our goal is to achieve more human-like humanoids which can do natural and dynamic motions as well as humans. Especially, joint DOFs redundancy, mechanical joint compliance and great joint generating power are very important for humanlike dynamic motions and tasks, such as running, jumping, landing, throwing/kicking/catching a ball, and so on...
A tendon-driven multijoint robot is a humanlike robot which is driven by a tendon-driven actuator. One of the problems is that the complexity of the tendon-driven multijoint robot body structure. The complexity makes it difficult to control body by commonly used methods which are based on a dynamics computation of a physical robot model. We proposed a appropriate control method for tendon-driven actuators...
High-powerd humanoid robots may move at a high speed in the same environment as human. When they receive shocks suddenly, instantaneous impact is applied to the structure of the feet and they can be broken. So, robots require shock-reduction mechanisms at the ankles. In this paper, we present one-legged robot with its ankle mechanism which can reduce landing impact by using a spring elastic element...
We have been developed and studied musculoskeletal humanoids. Our next motivation is to achieve more human-like humanoids which can do natural and dynamic motions as well as humans. We newly designed musculoskeletal tendon-driven arm, which can achieve humanlike body structure, flexibility of joints and great power of joints for this motivation. This paper describes how to design such an arm and proposes...
In this paper, we introduce an online decision method of foot placement for legged robots that manages unknown external forces. It consists of a fast trajectory generation method and an optimization method of foot placement. The fast trajectory generation method is based on an explicit solution for singular LQ preview regulation problem of an inverted pendulum model. By using the regulator problem,...
For making a robot that can help people safely, a musculoskeletal humanoid is an effective approach because of the ease of high degrees of freedom. However, many musculoskeletal humanoids have not yet been equipped with really humanlike bones and muscles. For making musculoskeletal humanoids with really humanlike bones and muscles, we thought that a “planar muscle” was a key. In wire-driven systems...
We have been studying on how to realize robots that have physical flexibility and redundant multiple degrees of freedom. How to control the machine is still a problem and even maintaining standing was difficult. After joining the Prototype Robot Exhibition at the EXPO'05 with our novel musculoskeletal humanoid `Kotaro,' we have made various improvements to the robot. This paper describes the improvements,...
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