Development of Modular Humanoid Robot Based on Functionally Distributed Modular Robot Architecture

This paper describes the development of a modular humanoid robot based on our proposed functionally distributed modular robot architecture. Our proposed architecture features three key concepts, 1) a modular humanoid robot, 2) a functionally distributed module, and 3) a transparent layered software model. Our humanoid robot is designed as a modular robot system consisting of several functionally distributed modules with exclusive mechanical parts, electronic parts, and software for elemental functions such as leg, arm, and vision. Depending on many purposes of researchers and users, our humanoid robot can be used as some kinds of humanoid robots or several autonomous robots, e.g., a wheel robot, an arm robot, or a head robot. We developed the prototype modular humanoid robot consisting of five functionally distributed modules such as two arm modules, a wheel module, a head module, and a main module for evaluating our proposed architecture.