Design of an upper-body humanoid robot platform

This paper presents a newly developed upper-body humanoid robot platform. The system has more than 52 degree of freedom (DOF), including two 7-DOF arms, two 15-DOF dexterous hands, a 3-DOF head, a 2-DOF waist and a 3-DOF mobile vehicle. To shorten development period and reduce cost, all the DOFs of the arms and the waist are designed with the modular joints. The two arms and two dexterous hands are identical. A control system with three hierarchical levels (including the teleoperation level, the central level and the joint control level) has been established to realize the control of the robot. Moreover, a high-speed serial communication bus (named as PPSECO) has been developed to complete communication between the controllers in the central level and in the joint level. At last, the box grasping experiment have completed successfully on the robotic platform, and the experimental results show that the robot has good operation performance.