This has been a work in progress for about 4 years now, and I have made little progress until very recently. I started working on this project to get a better understanding of how to create humanoid robots, with the view to experimenting with personal robots. It seemed like an ideal starting point – to create something that has mostly been design by someone else, and then add my own modifications. Gael Langevin has done a brilliant job of designing the Inmoov humanoid robot, and many people have built it over the years, adding updates and minor improvements. My version is shown below, but it still needs quite a lot of work on the arms.
The parts that have been added so far mostly work, and most of the parts have already been 3D printed and are ready to be assembled. I have also started building the new version of the head, which uses many more servos and has a latex face giving a much greater degree of expression. This is what I have so far – it’s partly assembled, buts still needs four more servos adding, the moulds for the latex face 3D printing and a lot of testing to make sure it works correctly:
More updates will arrive soon, as and when I get to them.
I was just looking at a video of some very early robots developed in the 1940s by W. Grey Walter. The early version (shown below without its shell) had a simple touch sensor and light sensor, and was ‘programmed’ to void obstacles. He called it a tortoise, and envisaged a much more complex version that would be able to behave in a way similar to a pet.
The design is very similar to a modern 3-wheeled robot that you can buy anywhere now.
Compare this with a modern 3 wheeled robot:
