Development of a Bio-mimetic Entertainment Robot with Autonomous Feeding Functionality

Most of the recently developed robots are human friendly robots which imitate an animal or human such as entertainment robot, bio-mimetic robot and humanoid robot. Interest in these robots are increasing since the social trend is focused on health, welfare, and graying. By these social backgrounds, robots become more human friendly and suitable for home or personal environment. The more bio-mimetic robots resemble living creature, the more human feels familiarity. People feel close friendship not only when they feed a pet, but also when they watch a pet having the food. Most of entertainment robots and pet robots use internal-type batteries and have a self-recharging function. Entertainment robots and pet robots with internal-type batteries are not able to operate during charging the battery. So far there have been a few robots that do not depend on a battery. However, they need a bulky energy conversion unit and a slug or foods as an energy source, which is not suitable for home or personal application. In this paper, we introduce a new bio-mimetic entertainment robot with autonomous feeding functionality, called ELIRO-1(Eating LIzard RObot version 1). The ELIRO-1 is able to find a food (a small battery), feed by itself and evacuate. We describe the design concept of the autonomous feeding mechanism of the ELIRO-1, characteristics of sub-parts of the manufactured mechanism and the control system.