The National Institute of Advanced Industrial Technologies (AIST), in collaboration with Kawada Industries, Inc., has developed a world-first human-sized, humanoid robot that can lie down and get up (HRP-2 prototype: 154 cm tall, 58 kg, with two hip joints with 30 degrees of freedom).

From a face up or face down position lying down, the robot can make a smooth transition to an upright position. Moreover, from an upright position, the robot can make a smooth transition to lie down in a face up or face down position. The movements have been achieved by combining human-like hardware, equipped with hip joints, powerful arms, and no backpack, with whole body motion-control software, that was newly developed to control the center of gravity and enable transition in a supported state.

To date, researchers have been able to develop small humanoid robots less than 60 cm tall that can get up. The AIST research, however, is the first time that a human-size humanoid robot over 120 cm tall has been able to get up. Increases in body size are accompanied by increased inertial forces when getting up or falling, making balance difficult to maintain while moving. Therefore, researchers to date had not been able to develop a human-size robot that could move in this way.

The AIST research is a significant advance toward being able to meet the basic requirements for laboring humanoid robots, i.e. if the robot falls over, it can get back up and continue working. The AIST research has also produced a dramatic shift in the paradigm for the development of motion control technologies for humanoid robots, moving from systems that cannot tolerate a single failure and were exclusively focused on how to walk without falling, to systems that can tolerate failure and then determine how to recover from the situation.

The research team plans to increase the number of variations in movement from lying or on all fours, add technologies to control falling, and construct motion software that allows the humanoid robot to get up safely after falling due to unexpected circumstances. Moreover, the AIST wants to accelerate R&D on the humanoid robot by making it widely available.

In terms of the roles played by the AIST and Kawada Industries in this research, Fumio Kanehiro and his colleagues at the Intelligent Systems Research Institute of the AIST were responsible for the motion control software, while Kawada Industries was responsible for developing the HRP-2 prototype hardware.

The research is part of the Humanoid Robotics Project (HRP) that was started by the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry in 1998 and will run for 5 years. As such, the project was conducted through joint research with the Manufacturing Science and Technology Center (MSTC), which was contracted by the AIST and the New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization (NEDO) to work on the project.