Cost Oriented Automation Approach to Upper Body Humanoid Robot

To develop an efficient robotic system is always a challenge, in particular if the cost of the system is also an important factor. This paper presents an overview of development of our 10 degree of freedom humanoid, Betty. Reducing the cost of the system requires optimization of all aspects to retain its flexibility, reliability and performance at minimum cost. During the design and development of Betty, we only use low cost hardware and open source software to address both cost and performance issues. We develop a real-time kernel optimized to control servo positions and read back servo data. Parameters of this kernel are controlled by a PID controller resulting in an adaptive real-time kernel. After solving the forward and inverse kinematics of our robot, we implemented portrait drawing as a sample application showing the performance of our system.