Biomedical Engineering Reference
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balancing, walking and manipulating objects while satisfying constraints such as
avoiding joint and actuator limits or keeping appropriate contacts with the envi-
ronment. Most of the time, these different constraints and tasks have different
priorities. For example, generally it is more important to maintain balance or
appropriate contacts with the environment rather than to grasp an object. However,
multiple contacts are not necessarily a bad feature, and indeed, humans naturally
and efficiently perform heavy tasks by using their legs, arms, head and trunk in
a coordinated whole-body movement producing locomotion and manipulation
while keeping equilibrium. Contacts on the more proximal limb parts are often
intentionally sought, because their reduced mobility turns into an advantage in
terms of stronger and more robust grasping.
Although clearly advantageous, the use of the whole body for loco-manipulation
introduces a host of completely new problems on the modelling and control side.
These issues can be addressed by compliant interaction modelling to make whole-
body loco-manipulation a real possibility. To empower a humanoid or quadruped
with the necessary adaptability, robustness and resilience to be deployed and
effectively used in a disaster scenario, a key asset will be the technology of
soft
robotics
. In this approach, traditional rigid robots are replaced by compliant
structural elements and elastic actuators, to withstand large force peaks, contact
uncertainties and energy exchange with the environment, but also permit safe
interaction with humans. These are key features of the robots (e.g. COMAN and
HyQ) under development in the Department of Advanced Robotics at IIT (Fig.
5.5
).
5.3.1 State of the Art: Humanoid and Quadrupeds
For humanoids the development in 1973 of WABOT-1, the first multi-DOF (
20)
fully actuated humanoid robot represented a ground-breaking achievement,
forming the design template for most subsequent humanoids and particularly for
those robots that originated in Japan. From this inspiration, the Honda series of
robots was developed from E0 (1986), E1-E2-E3 (1987-1991), E4-E5-E6 (1991-
1993), P1-P2-P3 (1993-1997), through to the original ASIMO (2000) and the new
ASIMO (2005) (Hirai et al.
1998
; Hirose and Takenaka
2001
). The P3 prototype
unveiled in 1998 (Hirose and Ogawa
2007
) was one of the most critical designs,
proving the viability of free moving humanoid platforms and spurring research on
other platforms such as the Humanoid Robot Platform (HRP) which subsequently
lead to HRP-2 L/2P/2/3/4 (Akachi et al.
2005
; Kaneko et al.
2008
). At the same time
at Waseda University, the WABOT evolved through many generations to the
Wabian robot (Ogura et al.
2006
).
Encouraged by the developments in Japan, researchers at KAIST designed and
built KHR-1/2/3 which ultimately became Hubo (Park et al.
2007
), which is now
one of the first commercial humanoid products. In Europe the iCub formed a
concerted effort to produce a “child-like” humanoid platform for understanding
and development of cognitive systems (Tsagarakis et al.
2007
; Metta et al.
2008
),
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