WALK-MAN is a humanoid robot developed by the Italian Institute of Technology and University of Pisa in Italy, within the European funded project WALK-MAN (www.walk-man.eu). The project is a four-year research programme which started in October 2013 and aims to developing a humanoid robot for disaster response operations.
The first prototype of the WALK-MAN robot will participate in the DARPA Robotics Challenge finals in June 2015, but it will be further developed both in hardware and software, in order to validate the project results through realistic scenarios, consulting also civil defense bodies. The technologies developed within Walk-man project have also a wide range of other applications, including industrial manufacturing, co-worker robots, inspection and maintenance robots in dangerous workspaces, and may be provided to others on request.
The robot perception system includes torque sensing, end effector F/T sensors, and a head module equipped with a stereo vision system and a rotating 3D laser scanner, the posture of which is controlled by a 2DOF neck chain. Extra RGB-D and colour cameras mounted at fixed orientations provide additional coverage of the locomotion and manipulation space. IMU sensors at the head and the pelvis area provide the necessary inertial/orientation sensing of the body and the head frames. Protective soft covers mounted along the body will permit the robot to withstand impacts including those occurred during falling incidents. The software interface of the robot is based on YARP (www.yarp.it) and ROS (www.ros.org).
More about WALK-MAN here.