Towards an anthropomorphic manipulator for an assistant humanoid robot

This paper describes ongoing effort in developing an anthropomorphic arm/hand manipulation system as part of the German Humanoid Research Project SFB588. This project aims at building a humanoid robot that assists humans in everyday service tasks. The manipulation part of this project has to deal with a service environment and to cope with the wide variety of objects and activities encountered in dynamic unstructured environments. Here, we describe several research lines aimed to fulfill these requirements. They consist in building anthropomorphic robotic hands and arms that integrate sensorial capabilities, developing manipulation algorithms that make use of such capabilities, and developing an architecture able to integrate the control of this subpart in the whole humanoid control system.