Development of an anthropomorphic head-eye robot with two eyes-coordinated head-eye motion and pursuing motion in the depth direction

The authors develop an anthropomorphic head-eye robot, in order to elucidate the human vision system from an engineering point of view and to develop a new communication system with humans. The robot developed, Waseda Eye 3 (WE-3), has 2-DOF eyes and a 4-DOF head rotation mechanism and comprises of the anthropomorphic robot `Hadaly-2´, developed at the Waseda University, as a subsystem. Since the camera drive mechanism needs light-weight and immune to backlashes, the eyeball part uses a tendon-driven gimbal mechanism. The neck part, except the yaw axis, is also driven by tendon-driven mechanism. In this experiment, the target used is a electric light bulb. The WE-3 head-eye robot realized a coordinated head-eye motion similar to the vestiburo-ocular reflex of human, and pursued motion in the depth direction using the angle of convergence, with the same speed as humans