A reinforceable-muscle flexible-spine humanoid 'Kenji'

摘要

We have been studying about muscle-tendon spined humanoid robots for aiming a novel humanoid robot that has modifiable mechanical flexibility, safety and wide variety of postures. This paper describes a new concept of reinforceable-muscle humanoid and the development of a new musculo-skeletal humanoid robot named "Kenji" that is a prototype muscle-driven humanoid next to previous developed humanoid "Kenta". Kenji has 140 actuators in total and numerous multi-modal sensors. This paper also presents some experiments that show the feasibility of the robot.