Design and Development of a Flying Humanoid Robot Platform with Bi-copter Flight Unit

In this paper, we propose a novel flying humanoid robot platform with bi-copter flight unit. Humanoid robots have the ability to move by walking, but it is not sufficient for some tasks. To enhance the mobility of humanoid robots, we apply aerial robotics and develop a flying humanoid robot capable of walking and flying in the air. We describe the modeling and control of bi-copter and takeoff pose generation method for flying humanoid robot. We show the hardware implementations of a bi-copter flight unit, a humanoid robot and the whole system of flying humanoid robot. We perform several experiments to verify the effectiveness of the flight control, extended mobility and the implemented robot system including perception.