Choromet

HRP-2M Choromet

HRP-2M Choromet is a 35 cm tall, 1½ pound humanoid robot which is, in a sense, the younger brother of HRP-2. It runs on ART-Linux which is a hard realtime linux developed at the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology in Japan. Choromet's CPU is an SH-4(SH7751R) which runs at 240 MHz and has 32 MB of Random access memory and 32 MB of Flash ROM.

Choromet is capable of a wide range of motion. It can stand on one leg, walk, and wave. It also has the ability to sit down and lie flat on its back (or face), then stand back up again (the HRP-2 model was also able to do this).

Choromet was developed in partnership between General Robotix, Inc. and Moving Eye, Inc., Pirkus Robotics and Dai Nippon Technical Research Institute. [1]

What differentiates Choromet from similar little humanoid robots is that it is equipped with a large number of sensors. This means that it can be programmed using feedback loops. Due to its complexity and price, Choromet is not so much a toy as a research platform. Software modules that require real-time processing are written as plugins in C++ and the plugin-manager itself is scriptable in stackless Python (programming language). This system is similar to the software used in the HRP series humanoid robots except for the fact that it does not include CORBA.

It has a triaxial force/torque sensor each leg and accelerometer and gyro sensors in its trunk. There are no cameras on the robot at this point because initial focus is on locomotion.

Pricing is 498,750 yen and sales are restricted to Japan only.

This price places Choromet firmly within the means of most small-budget research labs, even those labs dealing with multi-agent programs requiring the simultaneous co-ordinated use of several robots.