Early Developments of a Parallelly Actuated Humanoid, SAFFiR

This paper presents the design of our new 33 degree of freedom full size humanoid robot, SAFFiR (Shipboard Autonomous Fire Fighting Robot). The goal of this research project is to realize a high performance mixed force and position controlled robot with parallel actuation. The robot has two 6 DOF legs and arms, a waist, neck, and 3 DOF hands/fingers. The design is characterized by a central lightweight skeleton actuated with modular ballscrew driven force controllable linear actuators arranged in a parallel fashion around the joints. Sensory feedback on board the robot includes an inertial measurement unit, force and position output of each actuator, as well as 6 axis force/torque measurements from the feet. The lower body of the robot has been fabricated and a rudimentary walking algorithm implemented while the upper body fabrication is completed. Preliminary walking experiments show that parallel actuation successfully minimizes the loads through individual actuators.Copyright © 2013 by ASME

[1]  Friedrich Pfeiffer,et al.  Towards the design of a biped jogging robot , 2001, Proceedings 2001 ICRA. IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (Cat. No.01CH37164).

[2]  Jun-Ho Oh,et al.  Mechanical design of the humanoid robot platform, HUBO , 2007, Adv. Robotics.

[3]  G.A. Pratt,et al.  Late motor processing in low-impedance robots: impedance control of series-elastic actuators , 2004, Proceedings of the 2004 American Control Conference.

[4]  Atsuo Takanishi,et al.  Biped walking robots created at Waseda University: WL and WABIAN family , 2007, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences.

[5]  Jun-Ho Oh,et al.  Development of humanoid robot platform KHR-2 (KAIST humanoid robot-2) , 2004, 4th IEEE/RAS International Conference on Humanoid Robots, 2004..

[6]  Jerry Pratt,et al.  Series Elastic Actuators for legged robots , 2004, SPIE Defense + Commercial Sensing.

[7]  Jerry E. Pratt,et al.  Exploiting inherent robustness and natural dynamics in the control of bipedal walking robots , 2000 .

[8]  Heinz Ulbrich,et al.  Humanoid robot LOLA , 2009, 2009 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation.

[9]  Hamid D. Taghirad,et al.  Robust Torque Control of Harmonic Drive Systems , 2000 .

[10]  Daan G. E. Hobbelen,et al.  Limit Cycle Walking , 2007 .

[11]  Friedrich Pfeiffer,et al.  Modular joint design for performance enhanced humanoid robot LOLA , 2006, Proceedings 2006 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, 2006. ICRA 2006..

[12]  Dennis Hong,et al.  Design and Measurement Error Analysis of a Low-Friction, Lightweight Linear Series Elastic Actuator , 2013 .

[13]  Kikuo Fujimura,et al.  The intelligent ASIMO: system overview and integration , 2002, IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems.

[14]  Jun-Ho Oh,et al.  Experimental realization of dynamic walking of the biped humanoid robot KHR-2 using zero moment point feedback and inertial measurement , 2006, Adv. Robotics.

[15]  Atsuo Takanishi,et al.  Development of a new humanoid robot WABIAN-2 , 2006, Proceedings 2006 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, 2006. ICRA 2006..