Customization and fabrication of the appearance for humanoid robot

Abstract

Designing a robot’s appearance is a challenging task because the design should be both aesthetically appealing and physically functional. Therefore, this task was previously limited to experts with professional knowledge and experiences. Given the increasing popularity of consumer-level robots, non-professional users are expecting tools that allow them to customize their robot appearance. We address this challenge with the technology of additive manufacturing and propose an end-to-end solution to customize and fabricate the robot appearance for non-professional users. The input to our solution is a triangular character mesh (commonly used in feature animations and video games) and the output is a set of 3D-printing-ready shell parts. The complete solution includes matching the shape of the character mesh with the robot endoskeleton, optimizing the shape design to maximally avoid collisions and adjusting the motion trajectories to adapt to new shell design. This approach requires no professional background in engineering design and efficiently produces accurate prototypes of robot shells. Both virtual and physically printed designs are demonstrated on a consumer level humanoid robot to validate the feasibility of our method.