ISAC Humanoid Robot

ISAC is a humanoid robot that was designed and built in the IRL as a research platform for service robotics. The humanoid system also provides a test-bed to develop new technologies for human-to-robot and robot-to-human communications, including audio, visual, and gestural methods.




Figure 1: ISAC, the Humanoid Robot

Research Projects

  • Human - Humanoid Interaction
  • McKibben Artificial Muscles
  • Dual arm control
  • Pan Tilt Verge Head
  • Infrared motion detection
  • Sonic localization
  • PneuHand (Humanoid Hand)


Figure 2: ISAC interacting with a student

Hardware

The humanoid system contains
  • Two pneumatic 6DOF SoftArms actuated by McKibben artificial muscles.
  • An air compressor and compressed air delivery system.
  • Two four fingered, anthropomorphic dexterous manipulators, that we call the PneuHands, designed and built by the IRL.
  • Two force-torque sensors connected at the arms' wrist joints.
  • A Directed Perception pan-tilt platform modified in house for independent verge control of two color cameras.
  • Two 200 MHz Dual processor Pentium Pros. One controls grayscale image processing and a multi-channel audio signal processor and the other controls the two SoftArms with two arm controller boards (built in house).
  • One 266 MHz Pentium-II which controls hand using in-house controller board.
  • Two dual Pentium-III with two color frame grabbers for primary image processing.