HUBO

Hubo was one of the first advanced full-body humanoid robots developed outside Japan. But he’s probably better known for another humanoid: Albert Hubo, which had a Hubo body and an Albert Einstein animatronic head developed by Hanson Robotics.

HUBO, was originally created by Jun-Ho Oh, a distinguished professor of the Department of Mechanical Engineering, in 2004. Hubo has voice recognition and synthesis faculties, as well as sophisticated vision in which its two eyes move independently of one another.

Hubo II was introduced in 2010. It is lighter and faster than its older brother, weighing 45 kilograms, or a third less, and capable of walking two times faster. A major improvement over early humanoid designs is Hubo II’s gait. Most humanoid robots walk with their knees bent, which is dynamically more stable but not natural compared to human walking.

Hubo II, Professor Oh says, performs straight leg walking. It consumes less energy and allows for faster walking. The robot has more than 40 motors and dozens of sensors, cameras, and controllers. It carries a lithium polymer battery with a 480 watt-hour capacity, which keeps the robot running up 2 hours with movement and up to 7 hours without movement.

Hubo II uses two identical PC104 embedded computers with solid state hard disks and connected via a serial interface. The left one can control the entire robot, taking care of functions like walking and overall stabilization; the right one is normally empty and you can load speech, vision, and navigation algorithms to see how they perform on Hubo.