Human Support Robot (HSR)

The Human Support Robot is Toyota's answer to a problem the company frames in demographic terms: a shrinking number of carers for a growing number of people who cannot bend down. Announced in 2012 and released as an upgraded prototype on 16 July 2015, it is deliberately not a humanoid. The body is a 430 mm cylinder on omni-directional wheels, and the single folding arm - about 600 mm long - is mounted on a telescoping mast, so the whole robot changes height rather than bending at a waist. That mast is the design. The body extends from 1,005 to 1,350 mm and the shoulder travels from 340 to 1,030 mm, which is how one arm reaches both the floor and a high shelf. The gripper handles objects of 1.2 kg or less and up to 130 mm wide, and a suction pad picks up flat things a two-finger gripper cannot, such as a card or a sheet of paper. The head carries a microphone array, an RGB-D camera, a wide-angle camera and a stereo camera; the robot takes voice commands, tablet input, and can also be driven by a remote operator. The numbers worth reading carefully are the slow ones. Toyota's own release gives a maximum speed of 0.8 km/h, and a tolerance for floor steps of 5 mm and slopes of 5 degrees. Secondary sites routinely quote several times that speed. A machine that moves at 0.8 km/h in a room shared with a frail user is a safety decision, not a shortcoming, and it says more about the intended setting than any capability list. HSR has never been a product. Toyota lends the robots to universities and research institutes through the HSR Developers' Community, opened in September 2015, on projects of roughly two years, with members sharing software back into the community. That arrangement, rather than any sale, is why the machine became a common reference platform in academic robotics - including as the standard platform of the domestic-service league at RoboCup - and why a decade of published manipulation research runs on the same hardware.

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