ARMAR-III: An Integrated Humanoid Platform for Sensory-Motor Control

TLDR

Humanoid robots must possess manipulative, perceptive, and communicative skills for real‑time interaction in human‑centered environments. This paper presents a new humanoid robot under development for human‑centered environments, aiming to provide a reliable, highly integrated platform that supports research activities and enables household service tasks. The authors detail the robot’s subsystems, kinematics, sensors, and a hierarchically organized hardware–software architecture, mapping functional features into modules, and describe integrated skills for real‑time object localization and motor control. The platform successfully integrates skills for real‑time object localization and motor control into its control architecture.

Abstract

In this paper, we present a new humanoid robot currently being developed for applications in human-centered environments. In order for humanoid robots to enter human-centered environments, it is indispensable to equip them with manipulative, perceptive and communicative skills necessary for real-time interaction with the environment and humans. The goal of our work is to provide reliable and highly integrated humanoid platforms which on the one hand allow the implementation and tests of various research activities and on the other hand the realization of service tasks in a household scenario. We introduce the different subsystems of the robot. We present the kinematics, sensors, and the hardware and software architecture. We propose a hierarchically organized architecture and introduce the mapping of the functional features in this architecture into hardware and software modules. We also describe different skills related to real-time object localization and motor control, which have been realized and integrated into the entire control architecture