Design of anthropomorphic robot bionic eyes

Abstract

This paper presents a new type of anthropomorphic robot bionic eyes. Most existing eye mechanisms are serial mechanism and have no degree of freedom (DOF) for eye roll, however, the serial mechanism is not compact enough and the eye roll movement is crucial for image stabilization, consequently, we design a 3 DOFs compact serial-parallel eye mechanism which can implement the eye spherical movements without eccentricity, the diameter of the eyeball is only 45 mm, the total weight of the eye mechanism is 300 g, each of the eye contains two cameras (long and short focal length lens) for mimicking the perception features of human eyes. We also design a 3 DOFs serial neck mechanism for improving the flexibility and the ability of image stabilization of the robot bionic eyes. The neck and each of the eye contain inertial sensors, the robot bionic eyes can implement the vestibuloocular reflex like hybrid image stabilization function in two-stage by using the neck and eye mechanisms. The robot bionic eyes contain completely the same number of DOFs with human which is beneficial to human-robot interaction.