Researchers at Zhejiang University in Eastern China have unveiled a pair of table-tennis-playing humanoid robots that have been in development for 4 years. The bipedal twins stand 160cm (5’3″) tall, weigh 55kg (121 lbs) and possess approximately 30 degrees of freedom (7 in each arm). The right hand holds the tennis racket, while the left hands are equipped with three fingers that can grasp and serve the ball. They are able to automatically track the speed, direction, and position of the ping-pong ball using an overhead camera that captures the action at 120 frames per second. With a reaction time between 0.05 and 0.1 seconds and an accuracy to within 2.5cm, the robots were able to successfully rally against each other as well as human opponents.
In 1986, Honda began the Humanoid Robot Research and Development Program. Keys concepts were “intelligence” and “mobility”. Honda started with the basic idea that the robot “should coexist and cooperate with human beings, by doing what a person cannot do, and by cultivating a new dimension in mobility to ultimately benefit society”. This provided a guideline for developing a new type of robot that would be used in daily life, rather than a robot purpose-built for special operations such as manufacturing.
Like every inventors, they always start with making simple sketch on a paper (more…)
Japan’s National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) has build new Homanoid called HRP-4. This humanoid is the latest HRP Series with high density packaging technology. The HRP-4 is primarily designed for use at R&D facilities at universities and companies.
This unnamed robot creation by Frosty Orange performing a full 360 backwards flip from a standing position. Not only that, but it sticks the landing. Pretty impressive for a bipedal bot.
How this great Back Flip Humanoid system work?
Performance while maintaining the air that back, we aim to save energy consumption, frosty said. The idea is to change the ratio of bending the knee of the curve of the servo. With the ratio falling to just stretching your legs when burned, its minutes, to give the pretension of the spring. To increase the weight when standing spring.
In the past the knee with elastic links link was independent quasi-linear, This configuration has been synthesized in the middle.
Kojiro is an advanced musculoskeletal humanoid robot under development at the University of Tokyo’s JSK Robotics Laboratory. Musculoskeletal means Kojiro can mimic human body in skeletonmuscles, and tendons work to generate motion. The designer goal is to build robots that are light and agile, capable of moving around and interacting with the physical world in the same way our flesh bodies do.
Himeji Softworks’ JO-ZERO is considered the “High Grade Model”, priced at 120,000 JPY ($1250 USD) excluding the batteries and charger. It was designed with three tenets in mind: it must be cool, it must be fast, and it must be humanoid. Basically, most hobby robots don’t come with an external frame (with the Manoi PF-01 being the most notable exception). So they decided to design JO-ZERO a cool exoskeleton that comes standard with the kit, and after many concept designs they landed on the working color scheme. It looks at least as cool as most of the Robo-One competitors I’ve seen in recent years.
Katsuhisa Ito is a hobbyist who has been creating small robots since 1992. Roughly 10 years later, he got around to building his dream project – his own humanoid – whenever he had the time and money to work on it. Before building SILF H2, Katsuhisa Ito has been creating many small robots, SILF H1 and then SILF H2.
A robot called Robot Hubo is the creation of professor Jun Ho-Oh. Jun Ho-Oh from South Korea’s Institute of Advanced Technology. This robotcan talk, walk and even smile because it have 66 motors, wow this is huge amount of motor for a humanoid. Albert Hubo run on Windows XP Platform with 4 foot 5 inches tall make this robot become a very interesting robot and the way it talk and moving is cool. See the video below, it’s cool.
Below is the video from the Development of HUBO (KHR-3)
Great video to learn much about making the humanoid.
iCub is a project from RobotCub and is a 5 years long project and funded by the European Commission through Unit E5 “Cognitive Systems, Interaction & Robotics”. The main goal is to study cognition through the implementation of a humanoid robot the size of a 3.5 year old child. iCub has 53 DOF ( Degrees Of Freedom ), has fully articulated hands, head and eyes. This project uses an open systems platform that other researchers are encouraged to utilize, customize, and improve upon. Hand Design The Hand design is great. Look good and very compact. With 18 dof, the hand movement become more natural and closed to human hand movement.
Facial Expressions If we look at the video, there the robot face can make various expressions with changing the mouth and eyebrow. It’s look like the mouth and eyebrow made from light,so they can change it with various form by changing the light. Clever way. Great.
Lower Body design The design for lower body with more dof make the iCub can make more movement and more look natural if used for walking. See the Video below.
Overall, this is great project and produced great humanoid. With this humanoid, people can learn more about robotic design, robotic platform, robotic programming. robotic cognitive, robotic mimic and so on. So, who wanna and interest to this Humanoid? Of course i am lol.
