Design of a new cost-effective head for a low-cost humanoid robot

Abstract

It is challenging to design humanoid robots since the actuators must be meticulously coordinated to make their precise motions along with sensors. Many groups therefore who conduct various humanoid robotics research use commercially available robots. Unfortunately the price of the robots that are programmable with inputs from sensors is still high, which prohibits groups from conducting research using humanoid robots. In this paper we propose to develop an affordable but programmable humanoid robotics platform by adding a newly designed robot head to an existing low-cost humanoid robot. We conducted several experiments to show its feasibility. The results were promising. We expect the proposed design would expand the humanoid robotics research by providing a low-cost programmable humanoid robotics platform with sensor integration to the wider communities.