A 20-article engineering series building a fully spec-driven autonomous humanoid robot from first principles — locomotion, manipulation, vision, speech, power, and simulation.
Natural language interaction is central to human-robot collaboration. Humanoid robots operating in indoor environments must process continuous speech, detect wake words at low latency, perform automatic speech recognition (ASR) on-device to avoid cloud latency and privacy concerns, parse intent from variable linguistic input, and respond with synthesised speech — all within power and computatio...
Safe interaction with unstructured environments and direct physical contact with humans requires that humanoid robots move beyond position-stiff control toward compliant, force-aware systems. This article specifies the force control subsystem for the Open Humanoid platform, addressing impedance and admittance control architectures, distributed force-torque sensing at joints and end-effectors, c...
Autonomous navigation in human-shared indoor environments requires a humanoid robot to simultaneously solve geometric path planning, dynamic obstacle avoidance, and social space compliance — a hierarchical problem spanning global route discovery, local collision-free motion, and implicit human comfort modelling. This article presents the navigation subsystem for the Open Humanoid platform, cove...
Dexterous manipulation—the ability to grasp, adjust grip, and rotate objects within the hand—fundamentally distinguishes humanoid robots from industrial arms. This article presents a comprehensive specification for the Open Humanoid hand subsystem, covering the critical trade-offs between degrees of freedom and control complexity, underactuated versus fully-actuated finger architectures, tendon...
Humanoid robots operating in human-shared environments must implement multi-layered safety systems that prevent harm through hardware redundancy, real-time collision detection, and graceful fault isolation strategies. This article presents the safety architecture for the Open Humanoid platform (160–180 cm, ≤80 kg), covering hardware e-stop mechanisms with sub-100 ms response times, software wat...
Autonomous humanoid robots operating in human-shared environments require a multi-layered computer vision stack capable of simultaneously perceiving scene geometry, detecting and classifying objects, and building persistent spatial maps — all within strict real-time latency budgets. This article presents the computer vision subsystem specification for the Open Humanoid platform, covering depth ...
Reliable locomotion and manipulation in a bipedal humanoid robot depend fundamentally on the quality, latency, and fusion of sensory data. This article presents the sensing and perception subsystem specification for the Open Humanoid platform, covering inertial measurement units (IMUs), stereo depth cameras, six-axis force-torque sensors, tactile arrays, and joint encoders. We analyse sensor pl...
In September 1969, Neil Armstrong's flight suit was placed on public record at the Smithsonian. Every stitch, every zipper, every pressure seam — documented, catalogued, available to engineers, historians, and future designers who would need to build on what NASA had learned. This is how science is supposed to work. What you discover in public, you share in public. The knowledge compounds. Fift...
Picture this: an 80-kilogram humanoid robot loses its footing on a slightly damp factory floor. The fall takes roughly 0.4 seconds — the time it takes you to blink twice. By the time the software stack registers what is happening, the hip joint is already at 40 degrees of unexpected lateral deflection. Then comes the impact.
Actuation is the discipline where robotics collides with physics. Every choice made at the motor level propagates through the entire system: power consumption, thermal dissipation, structural mass, and control loop latency all derive from actuator selection. Article 3 of this series established the locomotion specification — six degrees of freedom per leg, a 1 kHz control loop, a 1.2 m/s normal...