Obrero

Obrero is a humanoid robot especialized in sensitive manipulation: manipulation that is as much about perception as action and is intrinsically responsive to the properties of the object being manipulated; manipulation that does not rely on vision as the main sensor but as a complement.

This work is being done by Eduardo Torres-Jara and supervised by Prof. Rodney A. Brooks.

The robot consists of:

Hand:

  • 8 force sensors
  • 5 position sensors
  • 5 motors
  • 7 high resolution tactile sensors

Arm (A DOMO arm)

  • 6 Degrees of Freedom (6 motors)
  • 6 Force sensors
  • 6 Angle sensors

Head

  • 2 Degrees of Freedom (2 motors)
  • Zoom and Focus control

More details on the robot can be found here:[.pdf].


Hand

A CAD model of the hand.

Hand assembled.
The hand was designed to be compliant. It has postion and force control of the fingers.Additionally, it has very sensitive tactile sensros.
Each of the fingers has series elastic actuators in its joints. The actuator used in shown later. A finger has two mecahnical cupled links. However they can decouple to conform to an object. The thumb and the middle finger can also rotate using series elastic actuator. The tactile sensors were custom made for doing manipulation task. Details about them can be found here. More details about the platform can be found here.

Some videos of the hand working: .
Hand Actuator

Hand actuators


Some videos of the actuator working: .
Eduardo Torres-Jara
Humanoid Robotics Group
MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
32 Vassar Street, Room 32-380
Cambridge, MA 02139
1.617.253.7471 (v)

people.csail.mit.edu/etorresj
etorresj@csail.mit.edu