Mini Me - The Mini Humanoid Robot
Imagine being able to control a miniature version of yourself with your movements. Well, this is what this project is all about.
How it started
I thought it would be cool to have a robot small humanoid robot that could mimic my movements. I investigated about existing alternatives, and I found that all humanoid robots available on the market were expensive, bipedal (which made them very unstable), or/and closed-source and closed-hardware, which meant that they were quickly falling behind new technologies and advancements in computing hardware. It was then when I started thinking of making a small humanoid robot myself, with wheels or threads instead of legs, fully open-source, and as cheap and easy to build as possible.
The goals
- Make a mini humanoid robot, powered by a standard Arduino micro-controller.
- Make it as cheap as possible.
- Make an exoskeleton to make it mimic movements.
- Make it easy to build, expand and modify, to allow people to go way beyond the base provided by the Arduino and experiment with autonomous control.
- If I manage to achieve all of that, the ultimate goal would be to foster an open-source community for the continued development of the robot, and to transform it into an accesible and inexpensive platform for education and research.
Project status
The project is now paused. I managed to get a working prototype, but I wasn't able to go beyond it for a lack of time, money and knowledge about electronics. I have since learned a lot of things and hope to continue this project in the future.
Links
The project was and will be continuously documented in my YouTube channel.
You can find a long form video explaining my progress so far here.
For a more exhaustive written documentation I used to use the Arduino project hub page. I have since encountered some problems with the site, so that documentation will probably be moved to this website whenever I continue with this project. Until then, you can find the old article here.