i-RoK: A human like robotic head

Abstract

In order to explore issues of human-robot interaction in a social context, we have constructed a humanoid robotic head called i-RoK (Fig. 1). This paper focuses on the study and design of the anthropomorphic head robot developed at the Mechanical Engineering Department of Middle East Technical University. The robot has a total of 8 mechanical degrees of freedom. This allows the robot to mimic the same movements performed by human head. We discuss major design issues of the developmental head and the design characteristics of the robot, i-RoK, in this paper.