LOLA

The JOHNNIE-project suggest that significant increases in walking speed, dexterity and autonomy are only possible if the robot's hardware is updated to state of the art mechatronics technology. Currently we are developing the humanoid robot LOLA as part of the project-cluster "Natur und Technik intelligenten Laufens" (biological and technical aspects of intelligent locomotion) financed by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Research Foundation).

To achieve fast and flexible walking, a thorough design of the mechatronical system is essential. All components of the robot must be seen as tightly coupled parts of a highly integrated system.

The humanoid robot LOLA is 180 cm tall and weighs approximately 55 kg. Its physical dimensions are based on anthropometric data. Fig. 1 shows a photograph of the robot. The distinguishing characteristics of LOLA are the redundant kinematic structure with 7-DoF legs, an extremely lightweight construction and a modular joint design using brushless motors. The mass distribution of the leg apparatus is improved to achieve good dynamic performance.

One of the most important questions regarding hardware design is how to choose the robot's kinematic structure in order to enable natural, stable and fast walking. Simulations and experiments have shown that additional redundant DoFs enable more natural and flexible walking patterns and extend the abilities of the robot in general. Fig. 2 shows the kinematic configuration with 25 actuated DoFs: the legs have 7 DoFs each, the pelvis has 2 and each arm 3 DoFs. A 3-DoF stereo camera head with pan and tilt axes and adjustable camera convergence angle is currently under development.

Besides the kinematic structure, further design goals can be defined to improve leg dynamics: (1) sufficient mechanical stiffness, (2) high center of mass, and (3) low moments of inertia of the leg links. To improve leg dynamics, new kinematic structures are developed for the knee and ankle joints, where heavier component parts (e.g. motors) are located close to the hip joint axis.

Since the robot's weight has a strong influence on global system dynamics, lightweight construction is of great importance. Our approach is to design major structural components as investment castings made from aluminum. In order to meet the weight and stiffness targets, design proposals are created by topology optimization. However, lightness of construction must be balanced with the demand for powerful drives necessary in order to achieve the desired torques and speeds at the required bandwidth. Therefore, actuator performance is increased carefully, using state-of-the-art motor, gear and sensor technology with high power density.

LOLA is controlled by an on-board PC mounted on the upper body and several local controllers carrying out low-level tasks, such as link position and velocity control, and sensor data processing. Joint controllers, sensors and the on-board PC form an intelligent sensor-actuator network with central controller. The new decentral components increase the system's performance from a technological point of view: similar to hierarchical structures in biological systems, sensor data are preprocessed decentrally and only relevant information forwarded to the central controller. Gait generation and stabilization run on the on-board electronics system without any support from outside except for power supply. An external PC is used only for monitoring purposes and to give basic operating commands if the robot is not connected to the vision system. Because of the high computational demand, image data processing is done on an external PC cluster. 

Q4 DLR robo

In the future humanoid robots are envisioned in household applications as well as in space environments. The capability to carry out complex manipulation tasks is a key issue. For its achievement the development of robust control strategies and intelligent manipulation planners for dual handed manipulation is currently a matter of active research in the robotics community.

The mobile robotic system Justin with its compliant  controlled light weight arms and its two four finger hands is an ideal experimental platform for these research issues. The newly developed mobile platform allows the long range autonomous operation of the system. The individually movable, spring born wheels match the special requirements of “Justin's” upper body during manipulation tasks. PMD sensors and cameras allow the 3D reconstruction of the robot's environment and therefore enable Justin to perform given tasks autonomously.

4-Finger Hand Robot

Based on the DLR Hand II, HIT (Harbin Institute of Technology) and DLR (German Aerospace Center) have jointly developed a multisensory robot hand. This hand, sold by Schunk as "SAH", demonstrates that highly advanced mechatronics can be embedded in applications at the medium-cost range.
The hand consists of four identical fingers, one of which is equipped with an additional drive, that functions as an opposing “thumb”. In order to correspond to the human motor functions, each finger is made up of four joints. For the Where and How, sensors at the fingers provide the force and positioning data for each joint, among others. The perfect integration of all drives including electronics in fingers and palm enables the mounting to any robot arm.


Design
The technology alone does not make a hand. For use in the daily environment, specific demands are made on the enclosure. Protective cover for the cable routing, slip resistant gripper surfaces as well as appealing optics to prevent the fear of touch are only some of the requirements that this hand meets.
 
Technology
The hand has four fingers with four joints and three actuators each. The thumb has an extra degree of freedom for fine manipulation and power grasping. The actuators are commercial brushless DC motors with analog Hall sensors. All the motors are integrated in the fingers and in the palm, respectively. Each joint is equipped with a contactless magnetic joint angle sensor and a strain-gauge based joint torque sensor. A high speed real-time serial communication bus (25 Mbps) has been implemented using FPGAs (Field Programmable Gate Array). Altogether only three cables are needed for the serial communication between the Hand and external CPU. The hand is controlled by one Digital Signal Processor embedded in a PCI board for any commercial PC. From the PC the hand can be controlled easily by a user-friendly interface and at the same time all the sensor data are displayed on the screen. The DLR Hand is recognized as technologically leading worldwide. By using commercially available brushless DC motors the DLR/HIT Hand was designed to become a close-to-production version of the DLR Hand II. It provides a promising base for a future series of complex multisensory robot hands.

Murata

Murata Boy

Murata, a Japanese company invested in electronic components, has put their technology to better use with Murata Boy – the world’s first bicycling robot. Standing 50cm tall and weighing about 5kg, Murata Boy can travel at a speed up to 2km/hour. The goal was not to go as fast as possible, but rather to maintain perfect balance at all times. Murata Boy costs about as much as a car, but he was developed for PR purposes so price was never a consideration.

Amazingly, Murata can balance on the bike moving forwards, backwards, and when remaining still (without planting his feet on the ground). He manages this feat using a gyro sensor located underneath his bicycle seat, which detects minute changes to his center of gravity. A rotating disc in his chest generates the necessary force to correct any slanting. TIME listed him in their list of Best Inventions of 2006.

Murata Boy has a camera located in his head which allows him to track his position very precisely. For example, he can steer the bicycle along a winding S-curve balance beam only 2cm wide without falling off. Using two ultrasound sensors located on his chest, he can avoid obstacles and even come to a full stop while maintaining his balance. Meanwhile, a shock sensor detects impacts to the body caused by bumps or uneveness in the road and sends signals to the control circuit.

Like the rest of us, Murata Boy originally used training wheels before mastering the technique. All of these components are built by Murata, making Murata Boy a great showpiece for their technology. Most of these technologies are applied to equipment in various fields including mobile, home electronics, and automotive industry. Murata Boy’s life goal is to ride around the world, and his motto is: “When you fall off a bicycle, get right back on!“

At CEATEC 2008, Murata Manufacturing unveiled Murata Girl along with a new controller that controlled Murata Boy’s movement. Called the Magic stick, the controller operated similar to the Wii remote using both pointer and tilt functionality to make Murata Boy move around.

Murata Girls

Unveiled in 2005, Murata Manufacturing’s bicycling robot mascot Murata Boy is so popular that his legion of fans have demanded they build him a companion. ”Why isn’t there a Murata Girl?” they asked, and so development began in late 2007, and finally on September 23rd 2008, Murata unveiled Murata Seiko-chan (Murata Girl).

Supposedly the paternal cousin of Murata Boy, Murata Girl rides a unicycle instead of a bike. She is 50cm tall and weighs 5kg. Her outward appearance, meant to evoke a tomboyish kindergartner, was designed by a trio of female employees who brought a feminine touch to the drawing board.

Murata Girl maintains her balance in similar fashion to Murata Boy; using gyroscopic sensors to detect minute shifts in her posture. Then, a fly wheel in her chest revolves to compensate for any changes that might cause her to fall. She can move forwards, backwards, and avoid obstacles, but she sometimes falls down. So far, she can travel at a rate of 15cm a second and can balance on a 2cm wide beam. Development continues to improve her functionality.

Besides demonstrating Murata Manufacturing’s electronic components, Murata Girl serves to broaden interest in the sciences amongst students young and old alike. Several engineers working at the company were inspired to apply after seeing Murata Boy. 

            

Roppie

Has been present robot maid that was developed by the Taiwan Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI). This robot is named Roppie, which appeared in the Taiwan International Invention Show & Technomart at the Taipei World Trade Center. This robot has an LCD screen to face with animated eyes, 20 actuator, and moves on wheels, which allows to retrieve the morning paper, pour a glass of water, and carrying various items.

Roppie weighs each arm just 3.5kg and has a higher strength to weight ratio of industrial robot arm. This robot is also programmed foam dancing and listening to music instruction. For now, Roppie remains tantalizing suggestions of what life might be like in year 2020. So if you have something to do to do the housework, the robot is probably could be one solution.

Myon

This is a new humanoid robot made ​​by the German industrial design company Frackenpohl Poulheim for Neurorobotics Research Laboratory at Humboldt University of Berlin. The name of this robot is Myon, was one of five versions of the modular project (Artificial Language Evolution on Autonomous Robots) ALEAR's robot series "M", which is used to study cognition and language acquisition and the formation of a robot agent. This robot consists of 6 parts (head, torso, arms, and legs) in a 
completely modular. Each has its own power supply, processing power, and a neural network which connects an individual basis. Allowing certain parts of modularity can still move even though the other did not work.

This robot uses material type of Bayer MaterialScience Makrolon polycarbonate material used to form this protective exoskeleton Myon. This robot has a built-in touch screen on its chest. He stands 125cm (4 ') tall, weighs 15kg (33 lbs), has 48 degrees of freedom, 35 torsion springs for biological motion, and 192 sensors. This is shown in the DMY International Design Festival Berlin 2010.

Myon designed to appear friendly, has the posture of roughly the same height as an 8 year old boy. One aspect of design that does not sit well with me is cyclopsian eye, which does not make sense in light of the humanoid body. Having two eyes not only make the look more friendly and aesthetic, but also will provide stereoscopic vision of robots that can be used for various things, including depth perception. That said, Myon modular nature means that a new head (and hands more naturally) can be swapped in and out if they feel the need for it.

Nagara-3

Gifu Prefectural Research Institute of Manufacturing Information Technologies (Gifu Industries) developed three small humanoid robots called Nagara, named after a river in the area, from 2001 to 2005.

Although specifically created to compete in RoboCup soccer, the robots were also conceived as partner robots for everyday life.  In recent years, it has been reported that children aren’t getting enough exercise, so they could be used to help make exercise fun for children.  Other potential uses include the transport of goods, or security (patrolling an area).  Therefore they were given facial expression recognition technology and simple speech functions.

The third version was unveiled in 2004 sporting a sleek, light blue exoskeleton.  It stands 110cm tall, weighs 25kg, and has 29 DOF (6 per leg, 6 per arm, 2 in waist, 2 in neck, 1 in head), with a battery life of 30 minutes.  This version is able to detect human motion by the relative positions of the head and hands and copy the movements with its own arms.  It was also capable of estimating the position of the soccer ball in relation to itself.  In 2005 two Nagara-3s were displayed at the Aichi World Expo, where they demonstrated their ability to walk, kick the ball, and imitate human gestures 

Ping-Pong Robots

Researchers at Zhejiang University in Eastern China have unveiled a pair of table-tennis-playing humanoid robots that have been in development for 4 years.  The bipedal twins (Kong 空 and Wu 悟) stand 160cm (5’3″) tall, weigh 55kg (121 lbs) and possess approximately 30 degrees of freedom (7 in each arm).  The right hand holds the tennis racket, while the left hands are equipped with three fingers that can grasp and serve the ball.  They are able to automatically track the speed, direction, and position of the ping-pong ball using an overhead camera that captures the action at 120 frames per second.  With a reaction time between 0.05 and 0.1 seconds and an accuracy to within 2.5cm, the robots were able to successfully rally against each other as well as human opponents.




The robots weren’t specifically designed to play table-tennis, but the researchers decided it would be a good test of their image processing software and the robot’s dexterity.  China has a high-tech development plan that seeks to develop domestic service robots that may one day serve humankind.