Dexterous Manipulations of the Humanoid Robot Saika

Atsushi Konno, Koichi Nishiwaki, Ryo Furukawa, Mitsunori Tada, Koichi Nagashima, Masayuki Inaba, Hirochika Inoue

Abstract: This article addresses the development of a humanoid robot named Saika and skillful manipulations performed by Saika. The developed humanoid robot Saika has a two-DOF neck, dual five-DOF upper arms, a torso and a head which consists of two eyes and two ears. Saika has humansize dimension and weighs eight kilograms. This article also presents three kinds of manipulations performed by Saika: (1) hitting a bounding ball, (2) grasping unknown objects by groping and (3) catching a thrown ball. Those tasks are chosen to study behavior-based movement control and intelligence.