Mechatronic Design of a Humanoid Head Robot

According to the requirement of high precision and dexterous visual tracking system for the humanoid robot, a development of three degrees of freedom head robot is proposed, and the design principle is described in detail. The modular joint design method is adopted to reduce the complexity of the mechanism design effectively, and the control principle of the double closed loop of the joint is also described. The visual perception module is composed of a laser range finder camera and two CCD cameras, and the sensors fusion algorithm is used to get the target position. The distributed control system is constructed based on the EtherCAT bus. On the basis of the hardware design, the robot kinematics equation is set up, and studied is the visual tracking control strategy by use of the Damped Least-Squares Method for the redundant mechanism to avoid robot singularity. Experimental results show that the head robot proposed in this paper can track dynamic target accurately and dexterously, and the control method is effective.