Some Issues in Humanoid Robot Design （人形机器人设计中的一些问题）.pdfVIP

Some Issues in Humanoid Robot Design 1 2 1 Atsuo Takanishi , Yu Ogura and Kazuko Itoh 1 Department of Mechanical Engineering, Waseda University, Japan 2 Advanced research institute for science and engineering, Waseda University, Japan 1 Introduction Even though the market size is still small at this moment, applied fields of robots are gradually spreading from the manufacturing industry to the others in recent years. One can now easily expect that applications of robots will expand into the first and the third industrial fields as one of the important components to support our society in the 2 1st century. There also raises strong anticipations in Japan that robots for the personal use will coexist with humans and provide supports such as the assistance for the housework, care of the aged and the physically handicapped, since Japan is the fastest aging society in the world. Consequently, humanoid robots and/or animaloid robots have been treated as subj ects of robotics researches in Japan such as a research tool for human/animal science, an entertainment/mental-commit robot or an assistant/agent for humans in the human living environment. Over the last couple of years, some manufactures started to develop prototypes or even to sell mass production robots for the purposes mentioned above, such as the SONY’s pet robot AIBO and the small size humanoid robot QRIO, the TMSUK’s tele-humanoid robot TMSUK04 and the TMSUK-SANYOs home utility robot ROBORIOR, the HONDA’s humanoid robot ASIMO, the TOYOTA’s partner humanoid robots, the NEC’s information agent robot PaPeRo, etc. Most of those robots have some lifelikeness in their appearances and behaviors. Moreover, AIST, METI of Japan launched some national proj ects, such as Humanoid Research Proj ect (HRP) in 1998 and the New Generation Robo