The torso of a humanoid robot is a fundamental part of its kinematic structure because it defines the reachable workspace, supports the entire upper-body and can be used to control the position of the center of mass. The majority of the torso joints are designed exploiting serial or differential mechanisms, while parallel kinematic structures are less used mainly because of their greater design complexity. This paper describes the design and construction of a 4 degrees of freedom (DoF) torso for our new humanoid robot. Three degrees of freedom, namely roll, pitch and heave, have been implemented using a 3 DoF parallel kinematic structure, while the fourth DoF, namely yaw, has been implemented with a rotational joint on top of the parallel structure. The design has been optimized to reduce the cost and the volume of the system. A first prototype of the torso has been constructed and validated with respect to our design requirements. Eventually, experimental tests have been conducted to assess the functionality of the proposed system.

In recent years the robotics field has witnessed an interesting new trend. Several companies started the production of service robots whose aim is to cooperate with humans. The robots developed so far are either rather expensive or unsuitable for manipulation tasks. This article presents the result of a project which wishes to demonstrate the feasibility of an affordable humanoid robot. R1 is able to navigate, and interact with the environment (grasping and carrying objects, operating switches, opening doors etc). The robot is also equipped with a speaker, microphones and it mounts a display in the head to support interaction using natural channels like speech or (simulated) eye movements. The final cost of the robot is expected to range around that of a family car, possibly, when produced in large quantities, even significantly lower. This goal was tackled along three synergistic directions: use of polymeric materials, light-weight design and implementation of novel actuation solutions. These lines, as well as the robot with its main features, are described hereafter.

Psychologists' debates on the role of knowledge to control actions in living beings have strongly influenced the research in the field of artificial intelligence and, consequently, of robotics. In both fields a focus of the debate has been the relevance (or even the presence) of a mental/internal representation in driving the course of actions of biological/artificial beings. In this paper we show that even very complex navigation tasks within maze-like environments can be carried out by an agent which needs to store just 'a handful of bytes' of internal representation about the world in which it is moving. The approach is called micronavigation, since it aims to capture the problem of mobile robot navigation in its entirety but with a minimalist approach.

Coordination among multiple robots has been extensively studied, since a number of practical tasks can be performed in a more effective way by employing a fleet of coordinated robotic bases. In particular, distributed coordination among robotic agents has been considered within the framework offered by the robotic soccer competitions. We describe the methods and the results achieved in coordinating the players of the ART team participating in the RoboCup F-2000 league. The team is formed by several heterogeneous robots having different mechanics, different sensors, different control software, and, in general, different abilities for playing soccer. The coordination framework we have developed has been successfully applied during the 1999 official competitions allowing both for a significant improvement of the overall team performance and for a complete interchangeability of all the robots.