Design and control of 9-DOFs emotion expression humanoid arm

The authors have been developing humanoid robots in order to develop new mechanisms and functions for a humanoid robot that has the ability to communicate naturally with a human by expressing human-like emotion. We considered that human arms play an important role. And, in 2003, we developed the 9-DOFs Emotion Expression Humanoid Arm. Then, we developed the Emotion Expression Humanoid Robot WE-4R (Waseda Eye No.4 Refined) by integrating the new arms into the Human-like head robot WE-4. Moreover, we introduced the new control algorithm for robot arm with redundant DOF into WE-4R. The new control algorithm was described by the function of geometric constraint and robot emotion. In this paper, we describe the mechanical design and the control algorithm of 9-DOFs Emotion Expression Humanoid Arm.