Kawada HRP-4

HRP-4 is what happened when the HRP line stopped growing and started slimming. Kawada Industries and AIST announced it on 15 September 2010 and began supplying it to research institutions in January 2011, with a body 151 cm tall and 39 kg heavy — three centimetres shorter than HRP-2 and 19 kg lighter, while carrying 34 degrees of freedom instead of 30. Seven of those axes are in each arm, one more than a human arm strictly needs, which lets the robot reach a given point with different elbow positions. The important decision is not the diet, though. Every joint shaft on HRP-4 is driven by a motor rated below 80 W. That threshold matters because a machine whose actuators cannot deliver much power is a machine that is much easier to clear for work near people, and it is the same principle Kawada carried into its industrial humanoid NEXTAGE, whose 15 axes are held under the same limit so it can run without a safety fence. HRP-4 is where the company put that idea into a walking, full-height humanoid — a research platform designed, in AIST's words, to be safe and practical for researchers. The rest of the design is about lowering the entry price of a bipedal humanoid: the specification was optimised, parts were shared and simplified, and the software runs on OpenRTM-aist, the middleware AIST maintains, so that laboratories can reuse components instead of writing a robot from scratch. Payload is modest and reported two ways: the launch release quoted 0.5 kg per arm, while AIST's later comparison for HRP-5P lists 0.9 kg with the arm held out horizontally — different measuring conditions rather than a change in the machine. Kawada Robotics still lists HRP-4 in the research section of its catalogue, without a published price.

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