Design and control of a humanoid robot

This study constructs a wheeled humanoid robot as our preliminary research of humanoid robots. The humanoid robot developed herein comprises mainly a wheeled mobile base, a fixed torso mounted on a mobile base, two 7 DOF robot arms, two 7 DOF robot hands and one 5 DOF robotic binocular head. A coordinated visually guided control structure is then proposed for this humanoid robot. Image processing algorithms are also proposed to increase the perception capability of rapidly detecting the location of a target object in a natural environment, thus reducing the computational burden for image processing. Finally, one experiment is conducted to verify the theoretical derivations and the performance of the humanoid robot. Three objects, i.e., a rectangular parallelepiped, a cup with a handle and a bottle-shaded container with square bottom, are placed on a table, with one selected as the target object. Experimental results indicate that the robotic head and the robot arm of the humanoid robot can coordinate with each other to locate and grasp the target object successfully.