SURENA IV: Towards A Cost-effective Full-size Humanoid Robot for Real-world Scenarios

TL;DR

This paper presents SURENA IV, a cost-effective, full-size humanoid robot with advanced locomotion and manipulation capabilities, designed for real-world applications and tested with novel inexpensive sensors and adaptive control.

Contribution

Introduction of SURENA IV, a humanoid robot with a new predictive foot sensor enabling obstacle navigation without force feedback and adaptable manipulation features.

Findings

Successful walking on unknown obstacles with 7cm foot error

Effective object grasping with different stiffness and geometries

Demonstrated capabilities include drilling, visual servoing, and writing

Abstract

This paper describes the hardware, software framework, and experimental testing of SURENA IV humanoid robotics platform. SURENA IV has 43 degrees of freedom (DoFs), including seven DoFs for each arm, six DoFs for each hand, and six DoFs for each leg, with a height of 170 cm and a mass of 68 kg and morphological and mass properties similar to an average adult human. SURENA IV aims to realize a cost-effective and anthropomorphic humanoid robot for real-world scenarios. In this way, we demonstrate a locomotion framework based on a novel and inexpensive predictive foot sensor that enables walking with 7cm foot position error because of accumulative error of links and connections' deflection(that has been manufactured by the tools which are available in the Universities). Thanks to this sensor, the robot can walk on unknown obstacles without any force feedback, by online adaptation of foot height and orientation. Moreover, the arm and hand of the robot have been designed to grasp the objects with different stiffness and geometries that enable the robot to do drilling, visual servoing of a moving object, and writing his name on the white-board.