Dav: a humanoid robot platform for autonomous mental development

Abstract

A humanoid robot, called Dav, was developed at Michigan State University as a testbed for experimental investigations into autonomous mental development. This general-purpose humanoid platform consists of a total of 43 degrees of freedom (DOF), including a drive base, torso, arms, hands, neck and head. The body may support a wide array of locomotive and manipulative behaviors. For perception, Dav is equipped with a variety of sensing systems, including visual, auditory and haptic sensors. Its computational resources are totally on-board, including quadruple Pentium III+ PowerPCs, large memory and storage, networks, and a long-sustention power supply. We discuss major design issues of a developmental humanoid and the design characteristics of the Dav robot in this paper.