Designing a High Performance Humanoid Robot Based on Dynamic Simulation

In this paper, we present a study on dynamic simulation to assist designing a high performance compliant humanoid robot. An open source dynamic simulator is introduced which includes the rigid body and actuator dynamics of the full humanoid robot. A set of representative tasks for humanoid robot in rescue operations are chosen and simulated. The data from these tasks are used in sizing the motor and transmission gear for each joint of the robot. It is shown that in the representative tasks, the most critical joint of the robot (in terms of power consumption) is the knee joint. Furthermore, a recently proposed optimization method is used to obtain the value of passive compliance for each joint. The data obtained from simulation studies are used for designing the new humanoid robot.