We would like to give robots the ability to secure human safety in human-robot collisions capable of arising in our living and working environments. However, unfortunately, not much attention has been paid to the technologies of human robot symbiosis to date because almost all robots have been designed and constructed on the assumption that the robots are physically separated from humans. A robot with a new concept will be required to deal with human-robot contact. In this article, we propose a passively movable human-friendly robot that consists of an elastic material-covered manipulator, passive compliant trunk, and passively movable base. The compliant trunk is equipped with springs and dampers, and the passively movable base is constrained by friction developed between the contact surface of the base and the ground. During unexpected collisions, the trunk and base passively move in response to the produced collision force. We describe the validity of the movable base and compliant trunk for collision force suppression, and it is demonstrated in several collision situations.
This paper proposes the mechanism and control of the biped humanoid robots WABIAN-RIV and WL-16. WABIAN-RIV has 43 mechanical degrees of freedom (d.f.): 6 d.f. in each leg, 7 d.f. in each arm, 3 d.f. in each hand, 2 d.f. in each eye, 4 d.f. in the neck and 3 d.f. in the waist. Its height is about 1.89 m and its total weight is 127 kg. It has a vision system and a voice recognition system to mimic some of the capabilities of the human senses. WL-16 consists of a pelvis and two legs having six 1 d.f. active linear actuators. An aluminium chair is mounted on two sets of its telescopic poles. To reduce the large support forces during the support phase, a support torque reduction mechanism is developed, which is composed of two compression gas springs with different stiffness. For the stability of the robots, a compensatory motion control algorithm is developed. This control compensates for moments generated by the motion of the lower limbs, using the motion of the trunk and the waist that is obtained by the zero moment point concept and fast Fourier transform. WABIAN-RIV is able to walk forwards, backwards and sideways, dance, carry heavy goods and express emotion, etc. WL-16 can move forwards, backwards and sideways while carrying an adult weighing up to 60 kg.
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