Development of autonomous mobile humanoid robot

The authors built a humanoid robot which behaves the same as the human in the space concerned. The mechanism and functions, such as vision sensor, acoustic sensor and loudspeaker, are mounted on this robot in order that the multi modal bidirectional communication between the robot and the human is possible. The authors adopted parallel processing by multi CPUs. The computers in the robot body are mutually connected by an Ethernet LAN. This LAN consists of the cerebrum system LAN and the motion system LAN in which a robot can quickly perform conditioned reflex actions as well as a human does. By using a wireless LAN, the LAN in a robot is connected to the outside LAN connecting the computers for software development and system support. In this paper, the outline of the developed humanoid robot is described.