Kenshiro and Kengoro, two robots designed by a team of engineers led by Masayuki Inaba of the University of Tokyo, are capable of performing physical exercises like push-ups and pull-ups due to their unique structure and composition.
Both robots feature ‘skeletons’ and muscles that closely mimic those of humans in terms of overall structure and proportion, as their creators’ goal was gain better understanding of “many systems and mechanisms in the human body.”
"The fundamental concept underlying our design is to consider the human mechanism, which contrasts with the conventional engineering approach used in the design of existing humanoids. We believe that the proposed human mimetic humanoid can be used to provide new opportunities in science, for instance, to quantitatively analyze the internal data of a human body in movement," the engineers wrote in an article published in Science Robotics journal.