A Musculoskeletal Flexible-Spine Humanoid Kotaro Aiming at the Future in 15 Years Time

Recently, humanoid research and development are widely under way. There are, however, still a lot of problems we have to solve. One fundamental problem is contact with a human. Robots coexisting with human beings have contact with human on a daily basis, and they are required to be entirely safe. Another fundamental problem for human coexisting robots is the diversity of humans’ fields; diversity means that of tasks and that of the environment. We propose humanlike body structure as a possible solution. It is comparatively easy to install physical flexibility to musculoskeletal robots, because their joints are passive. Muscle driven structure has advantage for increasing number of serially connected joints based on the ‘coupled-drive’ mechanism (Hirose et al., 1989). This paper presents the concept of our new humanoid Kotaro, describes the mechanical design including the actuation system and sensors, shows the demonstrations performed at the EXPO’05, and discusses the future perspectives of the research.