Development and evaluation of a centaur robot

Abstract

Recently various types of robots are being studied and developed, which can be classified into two groups: humanoid type and animal type. Since each group has its own merits and demerits, a new type of robot is expected to emerge with greater strengths and fewer weaknesses. In this paper we propose a new type of robot called the "Centaur Robot" by merging the concepts of these two types of robots. This robot has a human-like upper body and a four-legged animal-like lower body. Due to this basic architecture, the robot has several merits, including human-like behaviors and stable walking even on non-smooth ground. We describe its hardware and software architectures. Also we describe the experiments to evaluate its walking capability. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.