Cost Oriented Automation Approach to Upper Body Humanoid Robot

Abstract

To develop an efficient robotic system is always a challenge, in particular if the cost of the system is also an important factor. This paper presents an overview of development of our 10 degree of freedom humanoid, Betty. Reducing the cost of the system requires optimization of all aspects to retain its flexibility, reliability and performance at minimum cost. During the design and development of Betty, we only use low cost hardware and open source software to address both cost and performance issues. We develop a real-time kernel optimized to control servo positions and read back servo data. Parameters of this kernel are controlled by a PID controller resulting in an adaptive real-time kernel. After solving the forward and inverse kinematics of our robot, we implemented portrait drawing as a sample application showing the performance of our system.

A sketch drawing humanoid robot using image-based visual servoing

“…Reducing the cost of the system requires optimization of all aspects to retain its flexibility, reliability and performance. During the design and development of our humanoid robot, namely, Betty, we only used affordable hardware and open-source software to address both cost (approximately USD 3000) and performance issues (Baltes et al, 2011). The upper body of Betty consists of a 12-revolute joint system with 12 degrees of freedom (d.f.).…”

“…It then maps the pixels of the image to Betty's inverse kinematic model. Next, Betty executes the drawing task by performing open-loop movements which assumes that the environment remains static after the drawing has started (Baltes et al, 2011). However, without the real-time feedback of what has been drawn by Betty, it is impossible to make corrections to ensure the desired output sketch which is obtained at the end.…”