Now she is walking tall.
The HRP-4C "Miim" humanoid robot from the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) has been taught to walk in a female human's stride. Not the best one mind you, but it still is an achievement.
Miim is based on the User Centered Robot Open Architecture, which includes real-time linux, openHRP3 (robot simulation software), speech recognition, and RT-middleware. Also, the designers modeled Miim to have the same proportions as the average young Japanese woman. Which makes the bot 5 feet tall, weighing in at 95 pounds.
Introduced in 2009 as a singing bot using a program called Vocawatcher. Later, Miim was upgraded with special toes to simulate how humans can turn. This toe balancing feature paved the way to simulate walking in a natural way. The waist and knee movement was changed dramatically to meet their focus of single toe support, knee stretching, and swinging leg motion. The team changed the characteristics of the bot, mostly by taking the bots joints to their extremes, and matched the proper walk much better than before.
Read more about the creators, Kanako Miura, Mitsuharu Morisawa, Fumio Kanehiro, Shuuji Kajita, Kenji Kaneko, and Kazuhito Yokoi, in their report, “Human-Like Walking with Toe Supporting for Humanoids."
See Miim's closest competitor, PETMAN, through this link.
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