Yuta Namiki

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.

One-handed knotting of a flexible rope with a high-speed multifingered hand having tactile sensors

This paper proposes a new strategy for making knots with a high-speed multifingered robot hand having tactile sensors. The strategy is divided into three skills: loop production, rope permutation, and rope pulling. Through these three skills, a knot can be made with a single multifingered robot hand. The dynamics of the rope permutation are analyzed in order to improve the success rate, and an effective tactile feedback control method is proposed based on the analysis. Finally, experimental results are shown.

Thermal control of electrical motors for high-power humanoid robots

High physical ability of humanoid robots is desired for application to nursing care. Light and powerful actuators are required to realize the high-power performance. In this paper, we propose a method to bring out maximum performance of electric motors aggressively. The technique of motor core temperature estimation and control improves the motor power performance dramatically but safely without motor burnout. We have developed high power motor driver modules for the proposed method and equipped them into our humanoid robot and prototype jumping robot. High-power performance experiments with the robots demonstrate our method.

Realization of large joint movement while standing by a musculoskeletal humanoid using its spine and legs coordinately

We are developing the novel musculoskeletal humanoid that is able to do coordinated motion with arms, legs and spine. In this research, we present how to realize largely bending/extending motion while standing using spine and hip joints of a fullbody musculoskeletal humanoid, which has a complicated body like a human, such as over 90 muscles and about 60 DOFs. And we propose how to generate coordinated motions of spine and hip joints and how to control such a complicated humanoid in order to keep standing during its motion. Furthermore, we confirmed that this robot could bend/extend its spine and hip joints coordinately while standing by some experiments.

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.

Design of the musculoskeletal trunk and realization of powerful motions using spines

We are developing the novel musculoskeletal humanoid that is able to do coordinated motion with arms, legs and especially trunk body. In this research, we designed and implemented the trunk consisting of redundant articulated spine joints which can hold up and drive the upper body and pelvis. Furthermore, we confirmed that this trunk body ability to do full body motion, by an experiment of spine rotation motions with the real humanoid developed.

Automatic parameter adjustment of reflexive walking of a musculo-skeletal humanoid

Humanoid robots need mechanical flexibility, redundancy, multiple degrees of freedom, and so on. Because the hard and heavy body can hurt human or surrounding objects, multiple degrees of freedom and flexibility are needed in a daily life. A novel musculo-skeletal humanoid dasiaKojiropsila is one of the answer to these demand. It has those physical characteristics. How to move this complex bodily structure is a challenging theme. Especially motion generation using only partial information by itself make actional multiplicity, it will be useful in diversified environment. This paper presents the approach to make Kojiro walk and make Kojiro adjust self-parameter to walk using 6-axis force sensors in the feet.

Design of tendon driven humanoid’s lower body equipped with redundant and high-powered actuators

This paper presents how to develop a lower body with both redundant and high-powered actuator systems toward the next version of a fully tendon-driven musculoskeletal humanoid, which will be able to realize various flexible motions using whole body. The newly developed lower body has 44 actuators and each actuator can generate 25[kgf] muscle force continually. We propose the new design method of hollowing out the parts assembly areas, which realizes easy design of the skeleton with massive actuators. Finally we presented an experiment on the hip muscles tension and redundancy performances during the hip joint rotation motion.

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.