A Humanoid Two-Arm System for Dexterous Manipulation

Christian Ott, Oliver Eiberger, Werner Friedl, Berthold Bäuml, Ulrich Hillenbrand, Christoph Borst, Alin Albu-Schäffer, Bernhard Brunner, Heiko Hirschmüller, Simon Kielhöfer, Rainer Konietschke, Michael Suppa, Thomas Wimböck, Franziska Zacharias, Gerhard Hirzinger

Abstract: This paper presents a humanoid two-arm system developed as a research platform for studying dexterous two-handed manipulation. The system is based on the modular DLR-Lightweight-Robot-III and the DLR-Hand-II. Two arms and hands are combined with a three degrees-of-freedom movable torso and a visual system to form a complete humanoid upper body. In this paper we present the design considerations and give an overview of the different sub-systems. Then, we describe the requirements on the software architecture. Moreover, the applied control methods for two-armed manipulation and the vision algorithms used for scene analysis are discussed