Standard humanoid robots mimic the human form, but the mechanisms used in such robots are very different from those in humans, and the characteristics of the robots reflect this. This places severe limitations on the kinds of interactions such robots can engage in, on the knowledge they can acquire of their environment, and therefore on the nature of their cognitive engagement with the environment.

However, a new kind of robot is being developed by this project consortium – an anthropomimetic robot. Instead of just copying the outward form of a human, it copies the inner structures and mechanisms – bones, joints, muscles, and tendons – and thus has the potential for human-like action and interaction in the world.

Project objectives

• To design and build an anthropomimetic robot torso mounted on a powered mobile platform
• To develop methods of characterising such robots in terms of the information flows emerging from their human-like intrinsic dynamics and sensory-motor coupling
• To investigate ways of controlling the robot during movement, interaction, and mobile manipulation, and to combine the successful control strategies in a single architecture deploying them appropriately according to circumstances and tasks
• To exploit the anthropomimetic nature of the robot in order to achieve some human-like cognitive characteristics through sensory-motor control
• To evaluate the functional and cognitive abilities of the robot, both absolutely, and in comparison with a state of the art conventional robot