Humanoid Robot that can Lie down and Get up

This paper presents a humanoid robot that has the same size as a human and that can lie down to the floor and get up from the floor with the robot face upward and downward. We believe that the robot is the first life-size humanoid robot with the capability. The motions are realized by the combination of novel hardware and software. The features of the hardware are a human-like proportion and joints with wide movable ranges including two waist joints. The software segments the motion into the sequence of the contact states between the robot and the floor and assigns an appropriate controller to each transition between the consecutive states. The experimental results are presented.