Upper Body Development of Full-Sized Humanoid, HART, for Vehicle-Driving Task

Abstract

Abstract In this paper, the development of an upper body for the full-sized humanoid, HART is presented. The main design objective of HART platform is to enable the bipedal robot to drive off-the-shelf vehicles in real world environments. Continued from the previous efforts which focused on the lower body, the same technical design requirements, kinematic adaptation and low cost manufacturing, were kept being explored for HART’s upper body building in this study. First, the control system architecture and whole body hardware configuration of the robot are presented. Then, the mechanical and electrical components of each joint and its design process are described. The kinematic analysis and motion trajectory generation are also provided for the vehicle-driving task such as steering-wheel manipulation. Last, the built platform is tested through experimentation using physical vehicles to evaluate the presented design.