Development of the Humanoid Robot CENTAUR

2) Development of the Humanoid Robot CENTAUR

     

Figure 4. KIST Humanoid Robot CENTAUR   Figure 5. A human-like dumbbell lifting motion

I participated in the KIST humanoid project after joining KIST. A humanoid robot system called CENTAUR includes its mechanical structure, human interface, vision-based motion planning algorithm and embedded real-time controller. CENTAUR consists of two arms, two hands, four legs, as shown in figure 4. I was mainly in charge of building the upper-body mechanical hardware. Major concerns were conceptual design of joint actuating mechanisms and integration of various mechanical and electrical devices. Detailed mechanical implementation was carried out, which was a joint work with Hyundai Heavy Industry company.

As an application, a motion planning scheme was successfully tested. The idea is to minimize the joint actuating torque, based on the differential geometric description of the dynamic model. Figure 5 illustrates computed motion for the case of dumbbell lifting. This was a joint work with Prof. Frank C. Park in Seou National University