Abstract
It is preferable that robots have soft outer cover and give themselves fewer impacts in contact with a human or an environment. Although self-protection is one of the most important functions and inevitably required for robust robot architecture, simple introducing thick flesh to a robot tends to impede the movability and generality. A multi-jointed body structure has different demands about softness by the part. In this paper, we have realize soft and thick outer cover by multi-layered cover with distributed softness, and have introduced joint protection structure by dislocation and auto recover function. Finally, we realized various contact behaviors by a robot which has distributed soft cover and joint dislocation which includes toppling while walking and falling down from a desk.
