A humanoid neck using parallel manipulators

This paper presents a detailed review on humanoid robotic neck mechanism using a parallel manipulator. As the human neck is central to head and torso, the neck dictates the position and movement of the head. Mimicking the movement of a human head can be achieved in the robot by using parallel manipulators. In general, the parallel manipulators are referred as the Stewart Platform. As the neck in the human body plays a prominent role in interacting with the human world, the neck region carries a heavy load of the head which incorporates the system like Vision, Speech and Speech Recognition to provide a more humanly nature environment. Reason for using parallel manipulators in neck, is to balance the head while achieving rotation, flexion motions practically which is highly impossible. This is the area where the researches are concentrating to achieve results closer to the human neck motion. Based on this, the active studies in this field are examined to determine different trends of research and to identify the unexplained problems. Stewart Platforms current trends and the required analysis and designs of the platform are also listed.