Purpose

The main goal of the project has been the development of a small-size humanoid platform to carry out research on control, navigation and perception on robotics in general, and also to offer opportunities for undergraduate and pos-graduate students to apply engineering methods and techniques in such an ambitious and overwhelming endeavor.
Purchasing a commercial platform and develop research on it was not an option not only due to its prohibitive costs, but also because it would reduce the involvement at the lowest levels of machine design, which was posed as a relevant pursuit for the desired engineering approach. Moreover, the authors sought a platform with enhanced flexibility, namely at the level of system control, and not many platforms offer that level of flexibility. That was one of the relevant achievements of the project that was then based on distributed actuation and control, which on the other hand has raised new problems, and that this paper addresses further on.