Compliant Actuation Technologies for Humanoid Robots COMAN and WALK-MAN

Until recently, the main actuation approach for humanoid robots was the use of stiff position/velocity units coupled with highly geared, non-backdrivable transmissions. These humanoids are precise and highly repeatable, when performing locomotion and manipulation tasks within well-defined environments under anticipated physical interactions. However, it has become clear that the ability of these robots to cope with disturbances and adapt to unpredicted physical interactions is severely limited. To address this performance deficiency several experimental compliant actuation systems have been developed during the past decade. The incorporation of physical elasticity in the actuation poses many mechatronic and control challenges including the design complexity, the physical realization, and the sizing of the actuator passive elasticity particularly in multi degree of freedom compliant robots such as humanoids. I will introduce ongoing work and results towards the development of intrinsic and actively controlled compliant humanoid robots starting from the COMAN humanoid experience to the most recent development of WALK-MAN humanoid platform. Details on the actuation principles, mechatronics, dimensioning of the joint passive elasticity and motion control will be presented. Short Bio: Nikos Tsagarakis received his DEng degree in Electrical and Computer Science Engineering in 1995 from the Polytechnic School of Aristotle University, Greece, an MSc degree in Control Engineering in 1997 and in 2000 a PhD in Robotics from the University of Salford, UK. He is currently holding a Tenured Senior Scientist position at IIT serving as the Head of Humanoid and Human Centred Mechatronics Group where he developed the compliant Humanoid COMAN and most recently the high performance humanoid WALK-MAN. Before joining IIT he was a research Fellow and then Senior Research Fellow in the Centre for Robotics and Automation at the University of Salford where he worked on haptic systems, wearable exoskeletons, rehabilitation robots and humanoids robots. He is an author or co-author of over 250 papers in research journals and at international conferences and holds 14 patents. He has received the 2009 PE Publishing Award from the Journal of Systems and Control Engineering and prizes for Best Paper at ICAR (2003), the Best Jubilee Video Award at IROS (2012), the Best Student Paper Award at Robio (2013) and the Best Student Paper Award at ICINCO (2014). He was also finalist for Best Entertainment Robots and Systems - 20th Anniversary Award at IROS (2007) and finalist for the Best Manipulation paper at ICRA (2012), the Best Conference Paper at Humanoids (2012) and the Best Student Papers at Robio (2013). He has been in the Program Committee of over 60 international conferences including IEEE ICRA, IROS, RSS, HUMANOIDS BIOROB and ICAR. Nikos Tsagarakis is Technical Editor of IEEE/ASME Transactions in Mechatronics and Senior Editor of Robotics and Automation Letters.. Since 2013 he is also serving as a Visiting Professor at the Centre for Robotics Research (CORE), Department of Informatics, King's College University, London, UK. His Research Interests include Humanoid Robots, Mechanism Design, Compliant and Variable Impedance Actuators, Human Centred/Friendly Mechatronics of soft robotic arm/leg and wearable assistive devices and exoskeletons for power augmentation, Haptic Systems, Force and Tactile sensing.