Tamaki Nishino

An advanced musculoskeletal humanoid Kojiro

We have been promoting a project of musculoskeletal humanoids. The project aims at the long-term goal of human-symbiotic robots as well as the mid-term goal of necessary design and control concepts for musculoskeletal robots. This paper presents the concepts and aim of the project and also shows the outline of our latest results about development of new musculoskeletal humanoid Kojiro, which is the succeeding version of our previous Kotaro.

The designs and motions of a shoulder structure with a spherical thorax, scapulas and collarbones for humanoid “Kojiro”

Humanoid robots are still in a process of the evolution. We are trying to develop a next-generation which have safety, flexibility and multiplicity of uses. A shoulder structure is one of the keystone, because it controls arms and end effectors and it have direct contact with humans and daily life environments. We have designed new shoulder structure following the scapula-collarbone structure for a muscle-driven humanoid robot named ldquoKojirordquo (Fig. 1)[1]. We consider that the scapula-collarbone structures have the following merits, 1)wide range of movement, 2)flexible shoulder like humans, 3)safety from the driving system, 4)allowing space for a lot of parts inside the thorax. The shoulder structure is consisted of scapula, collarbone, upper-arm and thorax. We have devised the spherical shape thorax and scapula structure which realizes desired scapula motions. In this paper, we describe the design process and operation test of the shoulder structure.

The designs and motions of a shoulder structure with a wide range of movement using bladebone-collarbone structures

We are trying to develop an innovative humanoid which learns from the structure of a human shoulder, especially the bladebone and collarbone. We consider that the bladebone-collarbone structures have the following merits, l)wide range of movement, 2)having the shoulder structure built on to the outside of the chest, allowing space for a lot of parts inside the chest, 3) flexible shoulder like humans. In contrast, it is difficult to control the shoulder structure because it have multiple degrees of freedom and extraordinary physical constraints. An aim of our research is to create a repeatable motion generation system of the bladebone-collarbone structures for real musculo-skeletal humanoid robots. In this paper, we describe the design process of the bladebone-collarbone structures for a muscle-driven humanoid robot, and the simulation system considering geometrical constraints of the structures. Then, we show a motion experiment using the shoulder structures of the humanoid, based on the simulation system we presented.

An autonomous reactive system for humanoids equipped with very many actuators and sensors

A humanoid that has multiple sensors and actuators has a wide variety of potential behaviors. How to realize the rich behavior is a problem. In this paper, we propose a method to construct reactive system based on the combination of multiple behavior processing systems. The method consists of a server and clients. By this method, some people can develop elements of the behavior in parallel.