Research Robots

The Robotics Research Corporation of America produced this robot in 1988 for NASA to study the possibility of using robots to perform maintenance on the International Space Station. Each of the robot's arms has 7 joints and they are mounted on a torso with 3 joints, giving the robot a total of 17 degrees of freedom. This robot's arms are called redundant arms because they have seven joints. The extra joints enable the robot to perform many tasks in an infinite number of different ways - just like human arms. For example, he can reach around obstacles. The single serial chain (the torso) branching into two separate chains (each arm) makes this robot an excellent test bed for development of kinematic optimization algorithms.