Communications of the ACM
Watch Robots Do Chin-ps, Push-ps, and Sit-ps For the Sake of Science
Humanoid robots Kenshiro (left) and Kengoro (right) demonstrate their mobility.
Credit: Science Robotics
A team of Japanese researchers has developed Kengoro and Kenshiro, two humanoid robots that can perform push-ups, do crunches, stretch, and even sweat while exercising. Because of the robots' ability to perform human-like movements, they could serve as models to help scientists better understand how the human body moves.
"Our intent is to design a humanoid based on human systems--including the musculoskeletal structure, sensory nervous system, and methods of information processing in the brain," the researchers say. The team designed Kengoro and Kenshiro using human statistical data to give the robots more human-like proportions in terms of their mass distribution and the size of each body part.
Kenshiro and Kengoro are tendon-driven robots and have 114 joint degrees of freedom, compared to 548 joint degrees of freedom for humans, and just 55 joint degrees of freedom for standard axial-driven humanoid robots.
From Los Angeles Times
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