The Development of Emotional Flexible Spine Humanoid Robots

Over the past 15 years, there has been an increasing interest in humanoid robots. Researchers worldwide are trying to develop robots that look and move more like humans because they believe that anthropometric biped robots have several advantages over wheeled robots. For instance, humanoid robots can communicate with us and express their emotions by facial expressions, speech and body language. They can also work in our living environment without the need of special infrastructure. Moreover, they can serve as companions and take care of the elderly in our aging society. Due to the usefulness of humanoid robots, some research labs and companies, especially in Japan and Korea, have spent an enormous amount of financial and human resources in this research area. With advances in computer and robot technologies (RT), several impressive biped walking humanoid robots have been developed. For instance, the Honda’s ASIMO, Sony’s QRIO and the Kawada’s HRP-3P. Although these robots are able to walk stably, their movements are not as natural looking as a human’s. One of the reasons is that they do not have a flexible spine as we do. Instead, they have a box-like torso. Since it is very difficult to design and control a biped walking spine robot, researchers have been treating their robots as a rigid mass carried by the legs. They neglect the contributions of the spine in daily activities. We believe that in order for the next generation of humanoid robots to better express themselves through body language and to achieve tasks that cannot be accomplished by conventional humanoid robots, they should have a flexible spine as we do. This chapter is organized as follows. In Section 2 we give an overview of related research on flexible spine humanoid robotics and point out some of the problems faced by researchers in this research area. Then, in Section 3, we describe our approach for solving these problems. In Section 4, we present psychological experiments on the effect of a flexible spine humanoid robot on human perceptions. Finally, in Section 5, we conclude this chapter.