ROBOY

Roboy

First presentation in 2013
Inventor	Prof. Dr. Rolf Pfeifer, Pascal Kaufmann (University of Zurich)
Country	Switzerland
Year of creation	2013
Type	Humanoid
Website	roboy.org

Roboy is an advanced humanoid robot that was developed at the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory of the University of Zurich, and was publicly presented on March 8, 2013. Originally designed to emulate humans with the future possibility of helping out in daily environments, Roboy is a project that has involved both engineers and scientists. Initiated in 2012 by Pascal Kaufmann, Roboy is the work of engineers who designed him according to design principles developed by Prof. Dr. Rolf Pfeifer, the AI lab director, in conjunction with the assistance of other development partners. Both the team members and the partners of the Roboy project share a commitment toward continued research in the area of soft robotics. Later Roboy was moved to Munich, Germany, where Rafael Hostettler conducts research on it at the Technical University.

In general, standard humanoid robots mimic the human form, but the mechanisms used in them are very different from those that are in humans. The characteristics of these robots consequently reflect this difference. This places severe limitations on the kinds of interactions standard robots can engage in, the knowledge they can acquire of their environment, and thus on the nature of their cognitive engagement with the environment. Therefore, in 2011, a robotic project was launched in the European Union and it resulted in the development of the ECCE robot. Led by Professor Owen Holland of the University of Sussex, the ECCE project developed a new kind of robot that was modeled after the human anatomy. ECCE stands for Embodied Cognition in a Compliantly Engineered Robot, and the goal of the project was to develop an anthropomimetic robot whose body moves and interacts with the physical world in the same way flesh human bodies do. As athropomimetic, the robot copies not only the outward shape or form of a human body, but also copies the inner structures and mechanisms, such as bones, joints, muscles, and tendons. With these humanlike mechanisms the robot has the potential for human-like action and interaction in the world.

Project objectives:

The ECCE robot became a research platform. It uses many cables with a certain degree of elasticity to act as muscles and tendons. Like in a human body, all of the muscles and tendons need to be coordinated in order to get meaningful movement. To achieve this, there are 45 motors embedded in the robotic body that pull on the cables to make the body move. This allows the robot to have better potential to work in an unstructured human environment than a typical robot. The idea was to outsource the computation for the mechanics of the human body, like using passive compliance to make it absorb the energy in the right way to allow for safe interactions and to store energy in the muscles that can then be released to produce fast movements.