James: A Humanoid Robot Acting over an Unstructured World

The recent trend of humanoid robotics research has been deeply influenced by concepts such as embodiment, embodied interaction and emergence. In our view, these concepts, beside shaping the controlling intelligence, should guide the very design process of the modern humanoid robotic platforms. In this paper, we discuss how these principles have been applied to the design of a humanoid robot called James. James has been designed by considering an object manipulation scenario and by explicitly taking into account embodiment, interaction, and the exploitation of smart design solutions. The robot is equipped with moving eyes, neck, arm and hand, and a rich set of sensors, enabling proprioceptive, kinesthetic, tactile and visual sensing. A great deal of effort has been devoted to the design of the hand and touch sensors. Experiments, e.g., tactile object classification, have been performed, to validate the quality of the robot perceptual capabilities