Humanoid robot HRP-2Kai — Improvement of HRP-2 towards disaster response tasks

This paper presents a humanoid robot HRP-2Kai, which is the improvement version of HRP-2 towards disaster response tasks. HRP-2 stands for a humanoid robotics platform-2, which was developed in phase two of the Japanese national project HRP (Humanoid Robotics Project, from 1998FY to 2002FY), while Kai means improvement in Japanese. In a year of the ninth year from releasing HRP-2, the Great East Japan Earthquake shook Japan on March 11, 2011. Since we reflected on that we were not able to deploy our robots for emergency response at that time, we started a study of the disaster response humanoid robots by improving HRP-2. Improvements are presented with its basic specification in this paper.