Saturday, February 5, 2011

humanoid robot







A humanoid robot is an autonomous robot because it can adapt to changes in its environment or itself and continue to reach its goal. This is the main difference between humanoid and other kinds of robots. In this context, some of the capacities of a humanoid robot may include, among others:
  • self-maintenance (like recharging itself)
  • autonomous learning (learn or gain new capabilities without outside assistance, adjust strategies based on the surroundings and adapt to new situations)
  • avoiding harmful situations to people, property, and itself
  • safe interacting with human beings and the environment
Like other mechanical robots, humanoid refer to the following basic components too: Sensing, Actuating and Planning and Control. Since they try to simulate the human structure and behavior and they are autonomous systems, most of the times humanoid robots are more complex than other kinds of robots.
This complexity affects all robotic scales (mechanical, spatial, time, power density, system and computational complexity), but it is more noticeable on power density and system complexity scales. In the first place, most current humanoids aren’t strong enough even to jump and this happens because the power/weight ratio is not as good as in the human body. The dynamically balancing Dexter can jump, but poorly so far. On the other hand, there are very good algorithms for the several areas of humanoid construction, but it is very difficult to merge all of them into one efficient system (the system complexity is very high). Nowadays, these are the main difficulties that humanoid robots development has to deal with.
Humanoid robots are created to imitate some of the same physical and mental tasks that humans undergo daily. Scientists and specialists from many different fields including engineering, cognitive science, and linguistics combine their efforts to create a robot as human-like as possible. Their creators' goal for the robot is that one day it will be able to both understand human intelligence, reason and act like humans. If humanoids are able to do so, they could eventually work in cohesion with humans to create a more productive and higher quality future. Another important benefit of developing androids is to understand the human body's biological and mental processes, from the seemingly simple act of walking to the concepts of consciousness and spirituality.
There are currently two ways to model a humanoid robot. The first one models the robot like a set of rigid links, which are connected with joints. This kind of structure is similar to the one that can be found in industrial robots. Although this approach is used for most of the humanoid robots, a new one is emerging in some research works that use the knowledge acquired on biomechanics. In this one, the humanoid robot's bottom line is a resemblance of the human skeleton.

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