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Service robots performing human-like operations will be used in a great number of applications in the future. Humanoid robots should support people in their daily life as personal or assistance robots. In cooperation with human beings humanoid robots should share the same working space and should react human friendly. This requires them to be highly flexible, autonomous and adaptive to new situations. The design of such humanoid robots requires a high extent of integration of mechanical, electronical and computational technologies.

Mechanically, the humanoid robot ARMAR consists of an autonomous mobile wheel-driven platform, a body with 4 DOF, a two arm system with a simple gripper and a stereo camera head. The total weight of ARMAR is about 45kg. The mobile platform consists of two active driven wheels fixed in the middle of an octagonal board and another two wheels as passive stabilisers. The maximum velocity of the platform is about 1m/s. The anthropomorphic body of the robot is placed on the mobile platform and support a rotation of about 330 degree. It also can be bended forward, backward and sideward. To adapt the height of the robot, a telescopic joint is included in the body. With this joint the total height of the machine can be increased by 40cm.

Since the robot should support a simple and direct cooperation with the human, the physical structure (dimension, shape and kinematics) of each arm is developed as close as possible to the human arm in terms of segment lengths, axis of rotation and workspace. ARMAR has two redundant arms each having 7 DOF and a length of 65 cm.

The control architecture of ARMAR is hierarchical organized. It is divided in the computer architecture and the software architecture. The computer architecture consists of three levels: the micro-controller level, the PC level and the PC-network level. The micro-controllers are directly coupled with special power electronic cards, which control 4 motors. The micro-controllers are connected via CAN-bus with an internal industrial PC.

This research is carried out at the Forschungszentrum Informatik (FZI) at the University of Karlsruhe.

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