SHIN-TAI: A method for controlling characteristics of a humanoid robot's body using artificial muscles and fats

“SHIN-TAI” is an upper humanoid body composed of artificial muscles and artificial fats covered with artificial skin. The artificial muscles reproduce natural changes in shape and stiffness of real human muscles by a pressure-regulating system, and the amount of artificial fats can be increased or decreased by controlling liquid flow rate into liquid bags under the skin. By controlling these two programmable functions, SHIN-TAI can assume various body types, namely, “slim,” “muscular,” “voluptuous,” or “overweight.” Even its gender can be changed by region-selective control of the fats. It is demonstrated that a controllable character of a humanoid can be expressed by using our method instead of conversations or body gestures, which depend on a static human-like housing as in recent humanoid implementations.