 
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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