Humanoid robot and its application possibility

Research on humanoid robots has become a very active area. The Japanese Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) has run the Humanoid Robotics Project since 1998 with Prof. Hirochika Inoue, the University of Tokyo, as the leader and the Manufacturing Science and Technology Center (MSTC) as the project secretary. It was carried out with the participation of Intelligent Systems Institute/AIST, University of Tokyo and several companies. There were two major missions of the project. The first is application research, which entails finding a promising application of humanoid robots that can initialize mass production in the humanoid robot industry. In application research, five applications of humanoid robots, i.e. maintenance tasks of industrial plants, security services of home and office, human care, teleoperations of construction machines, and cooperative work in the open air were explored. The second is platform research, which entails developing a practical humanoid experimental platform with an open software structure that can be used by various researchers and engineers aiming to develop new humanoid functions and/or new practical applications. In order to use the experimental platform for application research, platform research began earlier than application research. In the first two years of the project period, the research efforts were concentrated on platform research and two types of humanoid platform, HRP-1 and HRP-1S based on Honda P3 were developed together with a humanoid simulator and a remote control cockpit. In the following three years, by using the two platforms, application research was carried out and the third humanoid platform, HRP-2, was developed.