HRP-2W: A humanoid platform for research on support behavior in daily life environments

We introduce a concept of a real-world-oriented humanoid robot that can support humans’ activities in daily life. In such environments, robots have to watch humans, understand their behavior, and support their daily life tasks. In particular, these robots must be capable of such real-world behavior as handling tableware and delivering daily commodities by hand. We developed a humanoid robot, HRP-2W, which has an upper body of HRP-2 [K. Kaneko, F. Kanehiro, S. Kajita, H. Hirukawa, T. Kawasaki, M. Hirata, K. Akachi, T. Isozumi, Humanoid Robot HRP-2, in: Proceedings of the 2004 IEEE International Conference on Robotics & Automation, 2004, pp. 1083–1090] and a wheel module instead of legs, as a research platform to fulfill this aim. We also developed basic software configuration in order to integrate our platform with other research groups. Through experiments, we demonstrated the feasibility of the humanoid robot platform and the potential of the software architecture.