A Miniature Humanoid Robot That Can Play Soccor

An intelligent miniature humanoid robot system is designed and implemented as a platform for researching walking algorithm. The robot system consists of a mechanical robot body, a control system, a sensor system, and a human interface system. The robot has 6 dofs per leg, 3 dofs per arm, and 2 dofs for a neck, so it has total of 20 dofs to have dexterous motion capability. For the control system, a supervisory controller runs on a remote host computer to plan high level robot actions based on the vision sensor data, a main controller implemented with a DSP chip generates walking trajectories for the robot to perform the commanded action, and an auxiliary controller implemented with an FPGA chip controls 20 actuators. The robot has three types of sensors. A two-axis acceleration sensor and eight force sensing resistors for acquiring information on walking status of the robot, and a color CCD camera for acquiring information on the surroundings. As an example of an intelligent robot action, some experiments on playing soccer are performed.