NEW OPEN SOURCE ROBOT: A cheap, lightweight, and agile platform for locomotion!
Called BRIDGE, it is an open-source humanoid robot platform, hardware plus control system.
It is an 88 cm, 12.5 kg humanoid with 21 active degrees of freedom that costs roughly $1,500.
Its distinguishing idea is that the body and the controller are designed together through a three-stage data-driven pipeline:
- anatomical constraints
- kinematic criteria
- closed-loop dynamic criteria
Hence the morphology itself is optimized to preserve human motion quality when the robot executes.
It demonstrates teleoperated locomotion, balance-oriented motion (bending, lunging, extreme balance) and highly dynamic motion including back-flips and expressive sequences.
I like that the thesis is designing the body and the controller together, not a controller for a fixed body, which inverts how nearly everyone else works; the robot is usually given, usually a Unitree G1, then train a policy on it.
At the end of the day, it is a sub-$2K open-source humanoid that does back-flips, the humanoid analogue of the cheap-arm democratization.