YEAR LATER UPDATE 4: 110 WORKING DAYS ON A COMMERCIAL GRADE HUMANOID SOLO BUILDING AT HOME. 25DOF BIPEDAL.
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Hello, its been a while! I want to share a bit about the journey behind my challenge of building an Open Source commercial grade humanoid robot totally alone at home. You might remember me from https://www.reddit.com/r/robotics/s/zzx9Yi4tXI. Which was my first iteration! My first iteration was honestly pretty bad. It was a beginner-level design, and many of you probably noticed it looked like something that would never actually work. Looking back, I completely agree. It lacked proper physics, kinematics, finite element analysis, and nowhere near enough structural rigidity to survive a walking gait. Everything looked fine inside a simulator, but reality was different. The robot literally broke during its very first movement. First Iteration on fusion360 looked like, yes you can make fun of it all you want but this baby tought me that you should not give up: I threw it away. After that, I gave up for a few months. Life got in the way, and I stopped working on the project entirely. Eventually I came back, more motivated than ever. For months I dove deep into control theory, kinematics, mechanics, physics, electronics, energy systems, transmission systems, Actuators, FOC, Torque and robot design. That led to the second iteration of my humanoid. second iteration render on FUSION 360: …which also failed. 😂 Why it failed? The whole design was just bad, i wasn't using the motors case for anything just covering everything up instead of using the motors to hold stuff together and better like real humanoids do. And many other things that i will make a video on. The second version was a huge improvement. Teleoperation was smooth, I had the software stack working well, and I was even able to experiment with reinforcement learning policies and software in depth. But mechanically, I knew it was still far from where it needed to be. Also Hardware. I had to add Robstride 04 and 03 to my actuators for required torque. For economic reasons i made the biggest mistake in my life that was selling the NVIDIA JETSON AGX ORIN. Anyways i got a JETSON ORIN NX 16GB as a replacement. So I scrapped that one too. (burning money yay) Now I'm building what I consider my latest iteration, and I'm continuously improving it before machining the final parts. My goal is for this robot to run, jump, and eventually do whatever I can teach it to do. I am heavily focusing on manipulation btw. This time the design process is completely different. I've incorporated finite element analysis (FEA) for every part, proper mechanical engineering principles, design for manufacturing (DFM), and many of the concepts used in modern commercial humanoid robots. Thanks ARXIV for many papers. This was before i understood that a screen on a head of a robot that will be falling is not a really smart idea. Latest Iteration (WIP): STILL IMPROVING. and Yes this is not just a CAD Humanoid. I have burned around 20kg- 25kg of PETG,PA-CF and some aluminum parts trying to make it happen 🙂 i will be posting new iteration teleoperation and manipulation videos soon. BTW One challenge I didn't expect was the battery. Lithium batteries are heavily restricted for import in my country Honduras, so I had to design and build my own DIY Li-ion (please do not use LIPO on humanoids that walk) battery pack from scratch. Which i have a full video on how to do it for a humanoid robot specific needs, i am sure this might help atleast someone. I've failed more times than I can count. But every failure taught me something. I'm going to keep building until this robot walks and eventually reaches the level of commercial humanoid robots. I AM HEAVILY FOCUSING ON MANIPULATION. And yes… It will be OPEN SOURCE. I'll continue posting updates here and on X, and I'm also working on a website where I'll publish in-depth tutorials explaining how humanoid robots work (FROM MY LEARNING) and how you can build one from scratch. Thanks to everyone who's been following the project. And also thanks to everyone that has made fun of me too! I have been building this totally alone. for 110 working days exactly. I have 110 days of videos of the process. With Honor, Carlos Abrahan Lopez 😀 submitted by /u/Medical_Skill_1020 |
