A leg-less humanoid robot

Humanoid robot

A humanoid robot or an anthropomorphic robot is a robot with its overall appearance, based on that of the human body, allowing interaction with made-for-human tools or environments. In general humanoid robots have a torso with a head, two arms and two legs, although some forms of humanoid robots...

. Is a low cost 7.5M JPY humanoid robot manufactured by Kawada KK of Japan

Japan

Japan is an island nation in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean, it lies to the east of the Sea of Japan, China, North Korea, South Korea and Russia, stretching from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea and Taiwan in the south...

. Its servomotors have millimiter precision. It is primarily employed in R&D

Research and development

The phrase research and development , according to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, refers to "creative work undertaken on a systematic basis in order to increase the stock of knowledge, including knowledge of man, culture and society, and the use of this stock of...

 centers and universities. Runs real time Linux

Linux

Linux is a Unix-like computer operating system assembled under the model of free and open source software development and distribution. The defining component of any Linux system is the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released October 5, 1991 by Linus Torvalds...

 QNX

QNX

QNX is a commercial Unix-like real-time operating system, aimed primarily at the embedded systems market. The product was originally developed by Canadian company, QNX Software Systems, which was later acquired by Canadian BlackBerry-producer Research In Motion.-Description:As a microkernel-based...

 in a 5ms loop. Application programming of movements is done via OpenHRP, a software maintaned by [General Robotix Inc.].
Hiro has a red push button to stop in case of emergency.

Criticism

The servomotors move commands are Point to Point mode.
Once a move command

Move (command)

In computing, move is a command in various DOS, OS/2 and Microsoft Windows command line interpreters such as COMMAND.COM, cmd.exe, 4DOS/4NT and Windows PowerShell. It is used to move one or more files or directories from one place to another. The original file is deleted, and the new file may have...

has been sent from a given application to servomotors' controlling QNX module
it is not possible to cancel or correct course to avoid potential collision.
This makes operation with humans unsafe or precludes real-time force feed-back applications.
Hiro does not handle move commands in a parallel mode. All commands are processed in serial mode.