Making a Humanoid Robot Part 1

Back Story

Hello,

After the long holiday session I am finally back on track to start my next project. I think it’s about time I try tackling humanoid robot making. I been bouncing ideas with my kid. He originally wanted a robot dog which can play, talk, and clean up his toys. After a few weeks designing out the details then he comes back with, let’s make a transformer robot. I of course said well that sounds even more awesome than the last!

I was reading up the latest from CES this year and came upon a kick starter company that made just that. The robot is called T9 by Robosen and it was originally suppose to be Optimus Prime, but I assume they didn’t want to pay royalties to Hasbro and ended up with a generic truck look. However, the functions are still there. After seeing this I starting going down the youtube rabbit hole and ended up watching humanoid robot competitions.

This is when I learned that we have come a long way from the early walking robots. I have never built a humanoid robot before, but after seeing how so many people built really agile robots I am inspired to try it for myself.
Having my own humanoid robot is one of my dreams. All sorts of ideas is flowing through my mind. I can make the robot talk, walk around the house, maybe clean up toys, and put away the groceries.
Of course all that will take a lot of time and development. Which I do not have too much of with a working full time and raising a kid. So I plan to make this a long series, but great mini stories as I go along.

Planning

To build a humanoid robot from scratch requires a ton of up front planning and research. Some things I ask myself are:

How big is this robot?
What kind of parts do I need?
How much are the parts?

How are the joints connected?
How am I going to program it?
What are the features I need it to function?
Are there a pre-made kits or instructions?
What are the current techniques for training the robot?
How do I make the robot walk?

First I looked for existing works with guides to jump start my project. I found one project with some details of how it was built. This build had 17 servos controlling multiple joints. Each servo contributes to what is referred as degree of freedom (DOF) for short. The robot also had two other key components, a gyroscope accelerometer and servo driver. The gyroscope and accelerometer will give the robot a sense of balance and force. The server driver allows multiple servos be controlled from a single interface to something like a raspberry pi.

My next steps which I will talk about in the next post, will be the design of the robot. Such as where are my joints going to be and what kind of frame will I use to put all the servos together.