Abstract
This chapter focuses on the early days of humanoid robotics research in Asia, all of which occurred in Japan. The scientific research on humanoid and anthropomorphic robots initiated by Kato (and the students in his laboratory) at Waseda University in the 1960s was the first in Japan, and probably in Asia. As little research on humanoid robotics was conducted at that time, most of the research in this area is attributed to Kato’s work. He developed a hydraulically powered one-leg mechanism in 1966 to understand human leg motion in walking. Then he tried to build two different types of bipedal walking robots; one was a hydraulically powered robot that realized static leg swing, sitting and standing motion, and the other was a pneumatic one that realized static walking, both in 1969. He and three professors at the university collaborated to develop a humanoid robot WABOT-1 (the WAseda roBOT) in 1970. This robot — the first full-scale anthropomorphic robot in the world — was completed in 1973 with not only static bipedal walking function for mobility but also stereo vison, speech recognition, and synthesis functions for communicating with humans. After Kato’s historical achievements, the number of researchers on bipedal walking robots gradually increased, mostly aiming to implement dynamic walking from the end of the 1970s to the middle of the 1980s.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
I. Kato, Development of Waseda Robot: The Study of Biomechanisms at Kato Laboratory, 3rd ed. (Self-Published, 1994)
I. Kato et al., Development of Bipedal Walking Robot (WABOT-1). Biomechanism, vol. 2 (edited and published by SOBIM printed by University of Tokyo Press, 1973), pp. 173--214 (In Japanese)
I. Kato et al., Hydraulically powered biped walking machine with a high carrying capacity, in Proceedings of the 4th International Symposium on External Control of Human Extremities, 1972, pp. 410–421
http://sobim.jp/ (In Japanese)
I. Kato, T. Yamashita, Legged Locomotion Robots and Artificial Legs (The Nikkan Kogyo Shimbun, 1975) (In Japanese)
M. Vukobratović, Legged Locomotion Robots and Anthropomorphic Mechanisms: A Monograph (Mihailo Pupin Institute, 1975)
The Research Group on the Mechanism and Control of Bipedal Walking Robots, Material of Bipedal Walking Robots (Self-Published, 1986)
S. Kawamura et al., Realization of biped locomotion by motion pattern learning. J. Robot. Soc. Jpn. 3(3), 5–15 (1985) (In Japanese)
I. Simoyama, Dynamical walk of stilts type biped locomotion. Bull. Jpn Soc. Mech. Eng. 26(215), 873–881 (1983)
H. Finabashi et al., Synthesis of leg-mechanisms of biped walking machines. Bull. Jpn Soc. Mech. Eng. 28(237), 537–549 (1985)
J. Furusho et al., Control of a dynamical biped locomotion system for steady walking. ASME J. Dyn. Syst. Measure. Control 108, 111–119 (1986)
J. Furusho et al., Realization of natural dynamic walking using the angular momentum information. Proc IEEE Int. Conf. Robot. Autom. 1990, 1476–1481 (1990)
T. Kato et al., The realization of quasi-dynamic walking by the biped walking machine, in Proceedings of the 4th RoManSy, 1982, pp. 341–351
A. Takanishi et al., The realization of dynamic walking by the biped walking robot WL-10RD, in Proceedings of the 1985 International Conference on Advanced Robotics, 1985, pp. 459–466
http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/adv/wol/dy/campus/spreport_1401_02.html
I. Kato et al., The robot musician WABOT-2. Robotics 3(2), 143–155 (1987)
S. Tachi, Virtual reality in robotics, in Proceedings of the 8th International Symposium on Measurement and Control in Robotics, 1998, pp. 29–34
M. Kim et al., Development of a humanoid robot CENTAUR-design, human interface, planning and control of its upper-body. Proc. 1999 IEEE Int. Conf. Syst. Man Cyber. 4, 948–953 (1999)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2019 Springer Nature B.V.
About this entry
Cite this entry
Takanishi, A. (2019). Historical Perspective of Humanoid Robot Research in Asia. In: Goswami, A., Vadakkepat, P. (eds) Humanoid Robotics: A Reference. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-6046-2_145
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-6046-2_145
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-94-007-6045-5
Online ISBN: 978-94-007-6046-2
eBook Packages: Intelligent Technologies and RoboticsReference Module Computer Science and Engineering