DURIP: Next Generation Humanoid Robots for Agile Physical Human Robot Interaction
Abstract
It is proposed to acquire two adult-sized high performance 12-DOF humanoid robots for $400K that will be shared between UT Austin~s Human Centered Robotics Lab and the Naval Research Laboratory~s Intelligent Systems Section. These humanoid robots uniquely employ Liquid Cooled Damped Series Elastic Actuators (LCDSEAs) and will greatly accelerate research in the control, planning, and artificial intelligence of such systems. In particular, such platforms will directly facilitate ongoing research on physical Human-Robot Interaction (pHRI) and agile multicontact locomotion and manipulation being conducted by UT Austin and the Naval Research Laboratory. Unlike existing actuators, LCDSEA excels along every Critical Axes of Performance: energy efficiency, power density, mechanical robustness, position controllability, and forcecontrollability. The underlying actuation technologies are (1) forced convective electric motor cooling, (2) damped series elastic actuation, (3) non-linear linkage mechanisms, and (4) transparency-based actuator impedance control. The integration of LCDSEA into humanoid robots builds upon years of research on distributed control architectures (i.e., joint-level vs.whole body level), model-based high bandwidth joint and whole body controllers, low communication latencies between controllers, and high performance software frameworks for control and application integration. Collectively, these technologies will enable adult-sized humanoid robots to achieve higher levels of agility, dexterity, and stamina, which are essentialto many real-world applications like emergency first responder and planetary exploration. The entire software stack from that running on the individual microprocessors on each joint to the central controller is open source enabling research into both low-level and high-level adult-sized humanoid control methodologies. This is critical for facilitating and advancing research into how teams of adult-size humanoid robots and real humans can physically collaborate to both accomplish existing tasks more efficiently and safely, and to achieve new tasks that would otherwise not be possible.
Document Details
- Document Type
- DoD Grant Award
- Publication Date
- Aug 12, 2016
- Source ID
- N000141612417
Entities
People
- Luis Sentis
Organizations
- Office of Naval Research
- United States Navy
- University of Texas at Austin