A first glance at Android Robots

By definition, android and humanoid robots are robots that look like human. Android robots are much more humanlike in appearance and aesthetics, and they may appear almost or completely as human, such as the ones in movies. Humanoid robots however, appear clearly as robots, but they still resemble human shape overall. Therefore the robots listed below are actually humanoids.

To make an android / humanoid robot is as hard as any robotics project can get. In order to give a robot the bipedal movement of two legs, body posture and movement, arm control, hand control, object manipulation skills, navigation, visual, voice, sound and logic processing abilities, all at the same time makes a humanoid robot project really difficult. Almost all the terms and concepts for robots, are applicable to making a humanoid robot. Even the simplest tasks we do in our daily lives, can prove to be big challenges for a robot, let alone a combination of them, let alone situations that involve decision making and performing those tasks at the same time.

We will eventually see domestic helper humanoids / androids in our homes, but this is not likely to happen before at least a decade. When it happens, it will be one of the things that will change our lives. The impact will be as big as the smartphones had in our lives. We will interact with them, they will help us, indoors or even outdoors, and we will download apps for them, for new abilities, or it will automatically happen as patches, online. They will have a few standard operating platforms, and operating systems, just like different computers by different manufacturers all use one of the few major operating systems. For now, a good candidate for operating system appears to be ROS, Robot Operating System. And of course, android / humanoid robots will be physically moving entities, and they must and will have safety measures installed and hardwired in them, in order to prevent any harm to a human being or surroundings.

Most humanoids today use motors to move arms and legs and body, but the motors, by their shafts providing torque, do not represent how human body works. The actuation must be done with hydraulic or pneumatic actuators, to represent the linear actuation that our muscles do, and in the long run, with artificial muscles, which have the potential to be hundreds of times stronger than human muscles. Many of the most advanced humanoids robot today use motors. It is true that they are robotics marvels, but with a motorized system, they can only move and carry and manipulate up to a certain limit and cannot benefit from the advantages of linear actuation. A robot that uses hydraulic actuators or artificial muscles, look more natural in many ways, plus they can also behave as underactuated systems. Having said that, today the many motorized robots can still perform better than linearly actuated robots.

To come up with the list of Android robots that we will post later, we need to eliminate a lot of old projects. Otherwise, this list could have contained more than 100 robots. And from the remaining, we selected the ones that were either appearing in the news the most and/or the ones that we were aware of and considered the most impressive, high quality and relevant… Note that there are also humanoids which are robot kits or toys, and they will presented separately. It must be remembered that we can only give brief summaries here, our descriptions may not cover all important points. Readers are advised to view a project or product directly from the respective product websites.

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