Development of a Humanoid H4 with Soft and Distributed Tactile Sensor Skin

A wheel type humanoid robot “H4” is developed as a platform for the research on vision-tactile-action coupling in intelligent behavior of robots. The H4 has the features as follows: 1) upper-body consists of 19DOF (3DOF waist, 6DOF arm, 4DOF head), light weight and enough space to attach skin, 2) multi-value tactile switch and matrix gel tactile sensor, two types soft and distributed sensor skin covers upperbody, 3) each tactile sensor module has microprocessor module which is connected via I2 C serial bus and make sensor network, 4) PC/AT compatible onboard computer which is controlled by RT-linux and connected to a network via radio ethernet, 5) 3D vision facility and 6) self-contained. This paper describe the design, implementation and experiment of H4, which is expected to be a common test-bed in experiment and discussion for tactile based aspects of intelligent robotics.