Thoughtware.TV

Kojiro Musculoskeletal Humanoid Robot

At this stage, Kojiro’s highlight is his spine, which can bend and flex like ours do to allow the robot to move its torso. While it’s true that Kojiro’s spine doesn’t offer a range of motion that’s significantly different from (say) a couple axes worth of conventional servos, the big advantage at this point is that having a structure of artificial muscles, tendons, and bones makes the robot much more forgiving of impacts to both its own structure and whatever it may be trying not to crush. The disadvantage, however, is that such a complex structure is tricky to get to move just exactly the way you want it to, since you’ve got all kinds of different artificial muscles tugging different ways at the same time.