Development of Life-Size Humanoid Robot Platform with Robustness for Falling Down, Long Time Working and Error Occurrence

Abstract

For a life-sized humanoid robot, continuous operation is required for working in the real world, such as industrial factory or a disaster site. In order to realize continuous operation, a robot have to improve robustness from various aspects. We developed a new humanoid robot considering three aspects of robustness. The first one is mechanical robustness. This is a mechanical soundness for a contact with an environment. It means that a robot have to take an action including contacts with an environment. Moreover, serious damages have to be avoided even when falling down occurs suddenly. The second one is functional robustness. A robot have to continue to work for a long time and have to work everywhere even where being severe environment, such as a disaster site, a fire site or a wet environment. The last one is robustness of an action of a robot. This means that a robot detects an error occurrence, finds out an error recovery action and recovers to correct situation even when unknown error occurs. We achieved mechanical robustness by hard points located to a robot body. They designed to support robot's own weight and to endure impact force. Functional robustness was achieved by using a power cable for a long time operation. We improved functionality of environment resistance by a robot wearing a functional suit. A robot can select functionality by changing a suit according to an environment. We achieved robustness of an action by configuring a stand up action using ``StateNet'' which can recover an error autonomously. Finally, we present a methodology to develop a humanoid robot platform which can continue to work in the real world.