Planet Arduino

Most people with an interest in robotics probably dream of building android-style humanoid robots. But when they dip their toes into the field, they quickly learn the reality that such robots are incredibly complex and expensive. However, everyone needs to start somewhere. If you want to begin that journey, you can follow these instructions to assemble your own talking humanoid robot.

This robot, dubbed “CHAD,” is a humanoid torso with moving arms, face tracking, and some voice assistant capabilities. It can understand certain voice commands, provide spoken responses, and even hold chat bot-style conversations. The arms weren’t designed to lift anything, but they are capable of movement similar to human arms up to the wrists and that gives CHAD the ability to gesture. It can also move its head to follow a face that it sees.

CHAD achieves that on a remarkably small budget of just ?5000 (about $60 USD) with a handful of components: two Arduino UNO R3 boards, several hobby servo motors, simple L298N motor drivers, and a PC power supply. One Arduino board controls most of the servo movement, while the second focuses on the face tracking movement.

The Arduino boards don’t handle the processing, which is instead outsourced to a PC running Python scripts. Those do the heavy lifting of face recognition, voice recognition, and voice synthesis. The PC then passes movement commands to the Arduino boards through serial.

CHAD’s body and most of its mechanical components are 3D-printable, with two lengths of wood acting as the primary structure. That helps to keep the cost down, giving everyone the chance to create a humanoid robot.

The post This DIY humanoid robot talks back to you appeared first on Arduino Blog.

As seen in the videos below, Zeus is a metallic humanoid robot capable of moving its head and arms around, featuring a pair of hand grippers that should be quite useful when the time comes. For now, creator Luis appears to be focusing on its vocal skills, with plans to eventually teach it how to walk.

The robot can engage in conversation with its companion, whether it’s answering questions like “What’s your name?” with“My name is Zeus,” or “What’s your favorite movie?” with “I wasn’t that impressed with the special effects, also the plot was not deep.” Zeus even lets Luis know when he “has no idea what to say.”

Zeus’ communication and movement are accomplished through a variety of hardware, including an Arduino Mega and an AAEON UP board, as well as an Intel RealSense Camera SR300 for vision. Luis is also using CMUSphinx for voice recognition, eSpeak for text-to-speech and AIML chatbot for interactive responses.

Perhaps we’ll see this ~1/2-sized humanoid traipsing around on its own in the future, though hopefully its comment about “taking over the world” was just a joke!