HyKim - Development of a robot bear: Bringing the strength and robustness of a bear's biomimetic features to a robot.

There are many commercially available robots that display biomimetic influences. Sony's Aibo and DasaRobot's Genibo are two examples where robot dog designs have drawn from nature. Aldebaran's Nao and Hanson Robotics' Zeno are examples of humanoids robots that have drawn influences from the human body. This paper presents the design of an autonomous 21 Degree of Freedom (DOF) robot bear, named HyKim and discusses the relevant biomimetic influences. After discussing the motivation for creating a robot bear, the biomimetic principles that were applied to the mechanical design, to ensure the resulting robot was ‘bear-like’, are presented. The design of the computer and electronic architecture was based on four essential design criteria - open architecture, performance, modularity and reliability. How these criteria were met is then presented, followed by a discussion on future research projects that will be based on or include HyKim. Finally a conclusion summarising the design is presented.