A Practical Humanoid Robot Morphology for Operation in Civilian Environments

Despite recent progress in robotics research and development, the effective design of multi-purpose robotic solutions for civilian and domestic environments has proven particularly elusive. Mechanically simple systems are typically incapable of traversing stairs (a feature in most buildings) and lack the flexibility to undertake many tasks that may be desired while more complex solutions suffer from practical issues relating to excessive weight, size, power consumption and control complexity. The purpose of this research was to develop a hybrid robot morphology which possesses a high degree of mechanical complexity while retaining much of the control simplicity, stability and power efficiency of a conventional wheeled robot. This paper presents the novel design of a robot morphology capable of exhibiting efficient locomotion within virtually all civilian/domestic environments and picking up objects from the ground. Through real-time control of the robot’s static stability margin, the pose of the robot has been engineered to maintain stability while reducing control complexity and energy consumption. A mathematical description of the robot’s forward kinematics is given. Practical performance capabilities of the first physical embodiment of this design are presented and future work including the implementation of a novel stair-climbing gait is discussed.