Anthropomorphic Muscular-Skeletal Robotic Upper Limb for Understanding Embodied Intelligence

In this paper, we describe an anthropomorphic muscular-skeletal robotic upper limb and focus on its soft interaction with the environment. Two experiments are conducted to demonstrate the ability of the system: object recognition by dynamic touch and adaptive door opening. The first experiment shows that the compliant robot is advantageous for categorizing an object by shaking and the second experiment shows that the human-comparable compliant robot can open a door without precise control. The robot is expected to have comparable anisotropic compliance to that of a human, which can be utilized for realization of human-like adaptive behavior. (C) Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden and The Robotics Society of Japan, 2012