Design of a humanoid head with rapid vision

The human head has five senses such as vision, audition, olfaction and so on. The objective of our research is to develop a humanoid head with multiple senses for a humanoid robot. The vision is an effective sensor for humanoid robots to acquire environmental information such as stair height and obstacle geometric shape so that the humanoid robot can adjust its gaits in time. In this paper, we focus the design and control of a humanoid head with vision. First, we give the mechanical design of the humanoid head with three DOFs and vision system, which consists two CCD cameras and a laser scanner. Then, we propose a method for rapid capturing environmental information such as stair height by our vision system. Finally, we provide the experiments by using our designed system and the proposed method.