In recent years, development of humanoid robots has gained momentum. For example, Tesla’s Optimus, Xiaomi’s CyberOne, NASA’s Valkyrie and Boston Dynamics’ Atlas have appeared since the days of Honda’s Asimo. These robots may serve as assistants in human daily life, such as making coffee, taking care of the sick and guarding homes. However, due to its complexity and robust nature, more research is still needed before humanoid robots can be used extensively.

Ro-BERT is a small-scale humanoid robot. This project is motivated by the goal of combining most, if not all of Neuramatix’s research, such as robotics control and equilibrium, vision and speech, into a single integrated platform to achieve human-level artificial general intelligence (AGI).

Ro-BERT has a height of 25cm, and weighs approximately 250g. Although it is miniature, all Ro-BERT’s body parts are designed to follow actual proportions of the human body. With this, Ro-BERT could be scalable up to a larger humanoid robotic system. On the other hand, scaling down a large humanoid robot may not be so easy.

Developing a miniature robot which closely resembles a human being was challenging. Part of the challenge was sourcing miniature hardware to meet performance requirements (e.g. torque). Currently, Ro-BERT has 22 degrees of freedom. In addition to body motions (which include neck, arms and hands, hip and legs), the robot can currently detect and track faces. In future, we envision Ro-BERT to have additional functionalities such as speech interaction, gesture control, object recognition and obstacle avoidance.