HUBO

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(CC) Photo: Min Lee
Albert HUBO.

HUBO is a humanoid robot developed at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology. The first HUBO, KHR-3, was the culmination of 4 years of research based on three earlier prototypes, KHR-0, 1, and 2, and it was officially unveiled to the public in January 6 of 2005. KHR-3 is physically similar to Honda's ASIMO, weighing 56 kg and standing at a height of 125 cm. Albert HUBO is the second and latest HUBO that features an artificial head of Albert Einstein in place of the previous design resembling a CRT monitor. The name HUBO is short for humanoid robot.

Development History

The first HUBO was developed by mechanical engineering professor Oh Junho and his Ph.D. student team over the course of about 20 years. During much of this time, they worked to secure the necessary technologies, including design and manufacturing, without relying on experts. Their amateur approach resulted in a very low development cost of about $500,000 compared to the $300 million that Honda had spent on ASIMO at the time when KHR-3 was completed.

KHR-0 (KAIST Humanoid Robot) was built in 2001 for the purpose of investigating the specifications of actuators (device that receives electric signal and performs mechanical action), such as power, torque, and speed, and the optimal weight and size of a humanoid robot. Unlike its descendants, KHR-0 is not a humanoid robot because it only consists of two legs and lacks the entire upper body, which was introduced in KHR-1.

(GNU) Image: Laurens van Lieshout
Harmonic drive.

The KHR-1 was completed in January of 2002. It is without hands and a head, and weighs 48 kg. The KAIST resesarchers chose a child-like height of approximately 119 cm, which would be best suited for entertainment and service purposes. KHR-1 was built with the goal of achieving real-time motion control of bipedal walking, as in humans, based on sensory feedback. This is different from bipedal walking as a playback motion obtained from an offline learning process, and also with partial online adjustments. It has 22 DOFs (degrees of freedom) - 12 for the lower limbs, 8 for the arms, and 2 for the waist. The DOFs of different axes in the joints of shoulders, waist, hips, and ankles were merged into intersections in order to attain a simple, closed-form solution (that is comprised of well-known mathematical functions) of inverse kinematics, the computation of the robot's movements. All the joints were built with harmonic drives for zero backlash and light, compact design. Because KHR-1 runs on internal batteries and is not wired to an external source, it was designed to operate with less than 100W during standby and around 150~240W when walking. The KHR-1 walks along a Zero Moment Point trajectory (points of contact on the ground where the total moment of inertia of the active forces equals to 0), which is predicted based on a simple model of the robot.