Humaniform1
From Merlin Systems Wiki
Merlin Systems Corp. Ltd has been developing a bipedal robot based around Humaniform (human inspired) principles. THe robot HF1 is the first prototype demonstrating some important new principles.
The structure is based around the use of Humaniform Muscle actuators. The Hip and shoulders use spherical joints, where artificial ligature is used to hold the ball in place. Muscles are then attached across the joint using tendons. The materials have been selected as readily available but close analogs of the real thing. The key challenge in providing a spherical joint was to deal with the sensing and control. A new three-axis (non-contacting) optical sensor was developed called THOR which can sense momovement in all three dimensions. The joint is able to move with a full range of 180 deg in two axis and a further 90 deg in the third (closely matching the human biological equivalent).
A key part of the control system philosophy relies on human-like compliant actuators with physilogically accurate spring-like properties. We started with McKibben style actuators back in 1998, but quickly found the control of these actuators to be a significant problem. The Merlin Humaniform Muscle is a development of a standard air muscle into an integrated compliant actuator with built in valves and optical linear encoder and control system. Please see the Humaniform Muscle page for more details.
The control system is based around research carried out by Dr Mark Norman and is a computational model M1, Basal Ganglia and Cerebellum regions of the Human Brain. Digilog is a toolset that has been developed to simulate populations spiking neurons offline and then synthesise into modular a hardware scheme using cost effcetive cheap micro controllers.
Humaniform1 - Leg assembly prior to population with muscles. The Hip-Girdle models the kinematic structure of a human and is able to stand without support.
The yellow boxes are spaces reserved to house the THOR (THree axis Optical Rotation) sensor.
Full bipedal robot schematic of kinematic structure.
