T-HR3

T-HR3 is the machine where Toyota stopped building humanoids that play the trumpet and started building one meant to be inside someone else's hands. Unveiled on 21 November 2017 by the company's Partner Robot Division, it is 1,540 mm tall, weighs 75 kg and has 32 powered axes plus ten fingers. The interesting engineering is not in the robot but in the joints. Every one of them is a Torque Servo Module - a motor, a reduction gear and a torque sensor in one package, developed with Tamagawa Seiki and Nidec Copal Electronics. Because each joint measures the force passing through it rather than only its own position, the robot can regulate how hard it touches a person or an object, coordinate its whole body to stay balanced, and, critically, send that force back to whoever is operating it. That operator sits in the Master Maneuvering System, and its specifications say more about the concept than the robot's do. The rig has 16 control axes, measures 850 x 1,500 x 1,450 mm and weighs 170 kg - well over twice the robot it drives. The operator wears data gloves and a head-mounted display, moves inside the frame, and feels resistance pushed back through it when the robot meets something. This is not remote control in the sense of a joystick; the frame mirrors the robot's body and the robot mirrors the operator's. Toyota named homes, medical facilities, construction sites, disaster areas and outer space as the settings it had in mind - a list broad enough to signal that T-HR3 was a technology demonstrator rather than a product. It was never sold. Its lasting contribution is the force-feedback teleoperation approach and the joint modules themselves, which are the part of the project that had to work before any of the destinations on that list became plausible.

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