AIST HRP-4C
AIST · Japan · 2009
The HRP built to human measurements rather than engineering convenience: 158 cm, 43 kg with battery, eight axes in the face alone, and body dimensions taken from a national database of young Japanese women.
HRP-4C, announced by AIST on 16 March 2009, is the odd one out in the HRP family. Its siblings are industrial-looking research platforms; this one was built to look and move like a person, and it went to work at the 8th Japan Fashion Week in Tokyo rather than to a laboratory bench. The measurements are the point. Rather than sizing the robot around its actuators, AIST took the dimensions from the Japanese Body Dimension Database 1997-98 and set them to average values for young Japanese women — 158 cm tall and 43 kg including the battery. Eight degrees of freedom sit in the face alone, enough for expressions rather than a fixed mask; the neck has three and the hips three. AIST does not publish a single total for the whole machine, so this catalogue does not quote one. The robot was not built for a catwalk joke. A humanoid shaped to real human proportions is useful as a human simulator: it can wear, carry and operate things made for people, which makes it a way to evaluate devices intended for human bodies and to develop products that assist human movement. Entertainment and exhibition work was the visible application; the underlying reason was that until a machine has a person's dimensions, testing anything designed around a person means testing on people. HRP-4C remained a research prototype and was never sold as a product.
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