Development of a whole-body elastic humanoid "Baneoid"

We have developed a whole-body elastic humanoid named "Baneoid," which has seventeen joints including thirteen series elastic joints. This paper presents the aims of the humanoid, describes the design concept, and shows a preliminary experiment of it. Mechanical energy of a humanoid robot consisting of series elastic actuators [1] is the sum of potential energy of each elastic element, gravitational potential energy of each link, and translational and rotational kinetic energy of each link. The total is preserved without energy input from actuators nor output to the environment, distribution of the mechanical energy elements is continuously changing; in other words, there are energy flows between the elements. Our aim is to control the energy flows for concentrating a large part of the energy at a specific element such as the hand (speed), or the center of mass (height).