Development of LARMbot 2, A Novel Humanoid Robot with Parallel Architectures

This paper presents the mechanical design of LARMbot 2, a low-cost, user-oriented humanoid robot. The design of humanoid robots has been one of the main challenges of robotics in the last fifty years, and the most successful solutions are all based on serial architectures, since the focus on humanoids is usually on control and Artificial Intelligence. Therefore, research on alternative mechanical designs is limited, especially if based on parallel architectures, despite their better mechanical performance. LARMbot 2 is characterized by parallel architectures both for torso and legs. The proposed design is presented with the kinematics of its main parts – legs, torso, arms – and then compared to its previous version, which is characterized by a different leg mechanism, in order to highlight the advantages of the latest design.