Humanoid Robot

ARMAR III is the third member of KIT’s ARMAR robot family. It embodies the vision of a robot family. It embodies the vision of a robot that learns from humans and interacts with humans in a natural way. Conceived for household use, it demonstrates its capabilities in a kitchen at KIT, where it masters challenging tasks like loading a dishwasher or serving drinks from the fridge. This demonstration environment, the KIT robot’s kitchen, has developed into an international standard for household robotics. The research issues during this development of ARMAR III concentrated on materializing holistic cognitive robot architectures, grasping and manipulating everyday objects, including household appliances. Learning new skills from observing humans and from experience, as well as interactions with humans in natural speech, were also a principal focus. Its human-like torso and mobile platform allow ARMAR III to move flexibly through its working space. The robot has a total of over 43 joints and over 50 sensors, among these, two cameras per eye, moment-of-force sensors, tactile sensors, position sensors, and laser scanners. It is equipped with 5 computers and ten other processor units specialized in very specific operations as well as two batteries, and weighs about 150 kg. Following its completion in 2006, a second version of this robot followed in 2008, ARMAR IIIb. ARMAR III came to be within the special research focus no. 588 of the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft) “Learning and cooperating multimodal robots” and formed the basis of succeeding generations of the ARMAR family. Currently, ARMAR-7, as its youngest member, represents the present state of development of KIT’s AI-based humanoid robot family. Tamim Asfour