ARMAR-7

ARMAR-7 is the latest assistance humanoid from the High Performance Humanoid Technologies Lab at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, a group that has built the ARMAR family since 1999.

The robot combines two torque-controlled arms with eight joints each, underactuated five-finger hands with four degrees of freedom and an RGB camera built into each palm, a three-axis head carrying several camera systems and a torso that bows in two axes. All of this rides on a holonomic base with three omniwheels, so the body can move in any direction without turning first.

Counting arms, hands, head and torso gives 29 degrees of freedom. The control software is ArmarX, the lab's open-source cognitive architecture. Typical tasks are opening doors, loading a dishwasher, handing objects to a person and learning new jobs from speech and demonstration, with homes and care facilities as target settings.

ARMAR-7 is a research platform and not for sale; KIT publishes neither height nor weight. Its predecessors are ARMAR-6 and the kitchen robot ARMAR-III, while Toyota T-HR3 shows a different approach to assistance humanoids.