HRP-4 robot is more agile and slimmer than its predecessors

Here is an article with a theme this website mostly covers, and those are robots meant to aid in our everyday lives. Kawada Industries and Japan’s National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) have recently revealed the latest version of a robot they have been developing for 10 years. The newest version of HRP humanoid robot is named HRP-4 and it is much more nimble than previous versions.

HRP-4 humanoid robot is 1.51 meters (roughly 5 feet) tall and it weights 39 kilograms (86 pounds). It is made of is made of aluminum alloy frame structure and has a total of 34 degrees of freedom (DoF) which make it more flexible than its predecessors. It is equipped with seven joints in each arm, as well as fingers that can move more precisely than earlier HRP models. All joint motors are less than 80 watts for design safety. Each arm has a load capacity of 0.5 kg (a bit more than a pound).

A compact notebook computer can be installed in HRP-4’s back to increase on-board data processing. It uses a combination of a Linux (RT-Preempt patch) OS and an OpenRTM-aist platform as middleware. The general standard POSIX API for real-time software development which enables effective use of multicore Intel Pentium M (1.6 GHz) processor it is equipped with.

At the recent unveiling, the agile blue-white robot demonstrated a range of skills that may come in handy in its future workplace, such as the ability to stand on one foot, twist its waist, strike poses, follow spoken commands, recognize faces, and track objects by moving its head which is equipped with a camera. Although it’s much slimmer than most of the other humanoid robots, it has its own power source.