Compliant actuation

ica an c re ot o e de Cable Driven Actuators (CBCDAs), and on the other side by combining custom made servo motors, Non that r collab an is n can b plete humanoids that use their full body to interact with the hu-mans and the environment. Paro [16], Robota [17], Keepon [17] and the Huggable [18] are social robots that especially focus on ro-bot assisted therapy (RAT). These social robots place the human central during human–robot interaction instead of the robot itself. The research field that studies this is called human–robot interac-cial robots is focussed on vision and audio, the study of tactile communication has often been neglected [10] with exceptions as Paro [16], Leonardo [6], the Huggable [20] and Robovie-iv [9]. Probo aims besides cognitive interaction also physical interaction. This desire leads to other design requirements that need to be ful-filled. For instance, safety aspects are one of the most important is-sues during physical HRI. To achieve these goals, a concept of a new child-friendly artificial creature, called Probo has been devel-oped. Fig. 1 shows a section view of the real prototype of Probo. A close up of Probo’s robotic head is presented in Fig. 2. The main dif-ference with other social robots is the use of compliant actuators