Research Team Develops Humanoid Construction Robot
Emily Pollock posted on October 10, 2018 |
HRP-5P in its resting position (left), and lifting a sheet of drywall (right). (Image courtesy of AIST.)
Japan’s National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) has developed a robot it says is “capable of the same hard work as human being,” including construction tasks like hanging drywall.
AIST’s latest creation, the prototype HRP-5P, is a humanoid robot built to work on construction sites. Many robots struggle to function in the chaotic and uneven territory of a typical construction site, so the team behind the HRP series of robots modeled them after humans, which have no trouble walking over unsteady ground. HRP-5P stands 182cm (72in.) tall, and weighs 101kg (223lbs) Many of the robot’s parts have more degrees of freedom than the corresponding parts in humans (i.e., its arms have 8 DOF, as opposed to the human 7) to allow it to handle large and complex objects. A complex head sensor gives the robot a 3D picture of its surrounding environment, and it’s capable of recognizing 10 different kinds of object regions of two-dimensional images.
The research team tested HRP-5P on a simulated construction site to see if it could handle relatively complex work like hanging drywall. To complete the task, HRP-5P would have to work through a series of smaller tasks, starting with map creation and object detection of the surrounding environment….