Design and Implementation of the Reconfiguration Mechanism for a Modular Humanoid Robot

This paper describes the design and implementation of the reconfiguration mechanism for a modular humanoid robot. To aid researchers in their works and enable users to request various tasks, humanoid robots are expected to require such reconfiguration mechanism. A robot with the proposed reconfiguration mechanism potentially consists of several functional modules such as arms, mobile components, and heads, and can be used as some kinds of humanoid robots or as several autonomous functional robots. We evaluated the efficiency of our proposed reconfiguration mechanism through the experiences using reconfigurable modular humanoid robot prototype R1. Experimental results show that the proposed mechanism achieves expandable and flexible reconfiguration for researchers and users by changing the robot configuration to different types of robots for many purposes. We believe that our humanoid robot with the proposed reconfiguration mechanism will enable user-specific humanoid robots more easily than ever before.