Humanoid robot simulator for the METI HRP Project

A simulator of humanoid robots and a controller of their whole body motions in METI’s Humanoid Robotics Project are developed. The simulator can emulate the dynamics of the motions of the robots whose structure may vary, and generate a sequence of the fields of view from the eyes of the robot according to the motions. The structure-varying system is managed by introducing virtual links. The controller can handle a biped locomotion, a dynamic balance control at the standing position and collision avoidance motions for the robots. These software modules are integrated via CORBA, which enables the Internet clients to use the software. A humanoid robot testbed has also been developed to verify the accuracy of the simulation by experiments in the real world. We call the system Virtual Humanoid Robot Platform, which we expect is the virtual counterpart of the hardware robot platform for humanoid robotics. © 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.