Anthropomorphic Robots and Human Interactions

The human has served as a focal point of robotics projects at the University of Utah’s Center for Engineering Design and at its commercial offshoot, Sarcos Research Inc. Anthropomorphic robots have been created to attempt to capture human capabilities and to facilitate teleoperation by similarity of structure and performance. Animatronic figures attempt to create realistic looking and moving humans and creatures for entertainment purposes. The first author has been involved with many of these projects, either in direct development or as a user in previous institutions (McGill, MIT). The second author has been responsible for the design and construction of these humanoid and animatronic robots. This paper reviews 20 years of work at Utah in humanoid robots. Due to confines of space, we will emphasize what was done and the process, rather than technical details. Such details can be found in the references, or are proprietary in view of sponsor or company prerogatives. The key theme in these developments is that they were sponsor-driven, not just self-contained university research. Thus these robots had to satisfy sponsor goals and commercial imperatives. At the same time, we were able to derive embedded research, to extract technological and research goals along the way to satisfy ourselves.