No abstract

No abstract

We are trying to realize a humanoid which has flexibility. If humanoids have flexible structure, safety and variety of the posture will be achieved. We especially focus on the role of human's spine and muscledriven system. By having a flexible spine, a humanoid will have safety and many degrees of freedom to realize the variety of the postures. By driving joints by tension-controllable tendons, flexibility of the joints will be able to be controlled. We developed a whole-body tendon-driven flexible-spine humanoid named "Kenta". This paper describes the design and control of Kenta's, focusing on the design of the spine. The spine consists of ten joints, vertebrae and rubber disks, ribs, and forty muscles equipped with tension sensors. The design refers to the structure of human's spine. This paper also proposes kinds of control methods of the spine. One uses a geometric virtual robot model, and another is based on direct teaching. Using these methods, some wholebody motions are presented.

In order to realize more natural and various motions like humans, humanlike musculoskeletal tendon-driven humanoids have been studied. Especially, it is very challenging to design musculoskeletal body structure which consists of complicated bones, redundant powerful and flexible muscles, and large number of distributed sensors. In addition, it is very challenging to reveal humanlike intelligence to manage these complicated musculoskeletal body structure. This paper sums up life-sized musculoskeletal humanoids Kenta, Kotaro, Kenzoh and Kenshiro which we have developed so far, and describes key technologies to develop and control these robots

No abstract