Dennis Hong, a professor of mechanical engineering and director of Virginia Tech's Robotics & Mechanisms Laboratory, or RoMeLa, has created robots with the most unusual shapes and sizes -- from strange multi-legged robots to amoeba-like robots with no legs at all.
Now he's unveiling a new robot with a more conventional shape: a full-sized humanoid robot called CHARLI, or Cognitive Humanoid Autonomous Robot with Learning Intelligence.
The robot is 5-foot tall (1.52 meter), untethered and autonomous, capable of walking and gesturing.
But its biggest innovation is that it does not use rotational joints.
Most humanoid robots -- Asimo, Hubo, Mahru -- use DC motors to rotate various joints (typically at the waist, hips, knees, and ankles). The approach makes sense and, in fact, today's humanoids can walk, run, and climb stairs. However, this approach doesn't correspond to how our own bodies work, with our muscles contracting and relaxing to rotate our various joints.
