Human-friendly robots for entertainment and education

Even though the market size is still small at this moment, applications of robots are gradually spreading out from the manufacturing industrial environment to face other important challenges, like the support of an aging society and to educate the new generations. The development of human-friendly robots drives research that aims at autonomous or semi-autonomous robots that are natural and intuitive for the average consumer to interact with, communicate with, and work with as partners, besides learning new capabilities. In this chapter, an overview of research done on the mechanism design and intelligent control strategies implementation on different platforms and their application to entertainment and education domains will be stressed. In particular, the development of an anthropomorphic saxophonist robot (designed to mechanically reproduce the organs involved during saxophone playing) and the development of a two-wheeled inverted pendulum (designed to introduce the principles of mechanics, electronics, control, and programming at different education levels) will be presented.