CERBERUS: DEVELOPMENT OF A HUMANOID ROBOT

摘要

The motive behind building humanoids is to design a robot that can duplicate the complexities of human motion, decision making, be able to help people and even accomplish tasks that cannot be carried out by humans. Building humanoids has always attracted scientists throughout the world but although the aim is seemingly simple, the task is never easy. This paper briefly describes the final design and gait definitions of the humanoid robot named Cerberus. Also, the manufacturing process and hardware selection is presented and wireless communication capability via remote control is explained. Software development for the Cerberus humanoid robot as well as the initial tests conducted on the prototype are addressed. The software package that is specifically developed for this biped includes the capability to describe the robot’s gait on the screen graphically by the click of a mouse, which is then transparently converted into the P-Basic code to control the servos. This approach significantly saves time and eases software development in defining new gaits for the robot. Various gaits have been developed and tested to assess the capabilities and limitations of the robot. The key design feature of Cerberus is that it has minimal amount of degrees-of-freedom to perform tasks such as moving forward and backward, making turns in any direction, and walking in quadruped or in biped configuration.