A small Canadian robotics company that has been around for nearly a decade but we hardly ever hear any news about recently started selling their own version of a humanoid robot with dual arms and a wheeled base. Hawk is Dr. Robot’s research, education, and entertainment robot.
The robot stands 1.4 meters tall and comes loaded with a number of sensors including vision, sonar, and laser (an optional upgrade to the base system.) Hawk resembles a human only in its upper body which consists of a torso complete with two arms (6 degrees of freedom each) and a movable head with stereo vision. A small touch screen on the robot’s chest allows for a more reliable method for commanding the robot.
The robot’s base is an i90 wheeled base made by the same company. Dr. Robot claims that Hawk can operate from as little as 2 hours to as long as 8 hours before recharging. The longer time can be achieved after an upgrade to the robot’s battery pack. Finally, Hawk can lift weights of 0.8-1.0 Kgrs which should be enough to carry small items around the house.
It is not clear to me how autonomous the robot can be when it comes to performing complex tasks but it comes with cross-platform software allowing users to tele-operate Hawk. The company claims that the robot is capable of simultaneous localization and mapping which should allow it a good degree of mobility around a house. For example, its navigation capabilities including visual locating a charging station and autonomously docking for recharging its batteries.
The video below shows the robot Hawk performing part of a serving task opening a bottle of water and pouring it into two different glasses.
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2 comments:
6:01 PM
Wow. That robot has some dexterity.
I also wonder how autonomous it is. If you move the cups around does it recognize the cup's new position? What if the cups are really small, or the opening of the water bottle is wide, does it recognize how much water to pour in?
Looks like a good platform to implement those things if it can't do it currently.
6:16 AM
Dan I don't know the answers to your questions but knowing the state of the art in object detection and manipulation I doubt that at this stage the robot can do all the tasks you mention with ease. There is still plenty of work to do in these areas.
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