HERMES Humanoid Head Design and Head Tracking
I work on the MIT Biomimetics Robotics Lab's HERMES Humanoid Robot. Currently, I'm building probabilistic dynamics models to allow predictive control of operator movements and intentions. I have also worked on hardware interfacing and the electronic design of the balancing system, writing software in Labview.
I have done mechanical design for the arms and the head. For the head, I built a pan and tilt camera jig that attached to the neck of the robot, and interfaced it with a set of video goggles. An onboard gyroscope tracks the operator's head movements, and this is sent via radio to the pan/tilt servos. Using this, the operator can intuitively look around the robot's environment during operation!
The aesthetics of one's robot is important at the DARPA Robotics challenge. I was also tasked to design a head to fit over the pan/tilt mechanism. After a huge number of fillets and irreversible cut extrudes, I came up with this.
Check out the robot in action (before the head)!