Mechanisms and Design of a Humanoid Robot for Two-handed Manipulation

It is now expected that robots show the ability to interact with unknown environments and cooperate with human safely. This paper proposes a nonholonomic wheeled humanoid robot system which is designed as a research platform for studying mobile manipulation, compliant control, cooperative operation control, human-machine interaction, etc. In the designed system, a complete humanoid upper body is formed by a movable torso with two hands and arms and a visual system. To further extend the work area of the system, the humanoid upper body is mounted on the mobile base. This system has advantages such as light weight, ability to manipulate large payload, dexterity, and human-robot interaction. In this paper, the mechanical design modules of the different subsystems are presently firstly and the main considerations are introduced briefly, and the requirements on the software framework and communication and computer architecture are described as well. The developed robot system would have broad application prospects in future human-computer interaction and compliance control.