Mertz

MERTZ

MERTZ is another humanoid robot developed by the MIT Media Lab, designed for exploring scalable learning in social backgrounds.  Its mechanical design has been reduced to minimize the total size and weight (10.65 x 6.2.7.1” and 4.25 pounds).

It is equipped with actuators, a total of 12 DOF (five for the active-vision head and eyes, two on its force-controlled neck, one on its coupled eyelids, and four on its facial features, such as eyebrows and lips). It is also installed with two digital firewire cameras, GN Netcomm microphone, and encoders and potentiometer sensors for proprioceptive feedback.

MERTZ’s custom-made hardware includes a Motorola DSP56F807 motor controller, LMD18200-based amplifier, and STACK architecture. Recently, it has been used in an experiment and it has been proven that it has learned to correlate objects and people by differentiating people’s habits, and frequently uttered phoneme sequences.