A new transformable mini-humanoid robot: Design and algorithm

Recently, development of mini-sized humanoid robots with a certain level of intelligence becomes a popular research topic. Because of its small size and light weight, those humanoid robots become more portable and attractive. However, extra difficulties are introduced in hardware selection, mechanical design, motion planning, etc. In this paper, we propose the development of a transformable mini-humanoid robot, TMBot including works in mechanical design and motion planning. It is half the size of traditional servo humanoids. To make it to be more portable, it is designed with a function of box transformation. Based on the box like structure, a user can easily put the robot into a bag. It will transform back to the human-like status whenever the user wants to play with it. For the motion planning algorithm, the concept of inverse kinematics is introduced. In the algorithm, 3-D inverse kinematics of the robot is first figured out which is then utilized in gait generation. To ensure the motion stability, a balance control algorithm is developed. It is a geometric method with the application of 3-D inverse kinematics to adjust the tilting of the robot while walking. Experimental results have proved the success of TMBot in terms of portability, gait generation, and tilting correction using the idea of 3-D inverse kinematics based balance control algorithm.