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Berkeley Humanoid Lite – Open-source robot

lite.berkeley-humanoid.org

31–40 of 40 posts

Re: Berkeley Humanoid Lite – Open-source robot

#31

What is the way to go in hobby robotics today? I'm more interested in high level, and want the lower level to 'just work' with minimum efforts from my side. Having mechanical part and vision what would be the right choice for low-middle software to control robotic arm and car, may be attached one to another. ROS2?

I’d say start with a sumo robot, line follower, or maze solver. That’ll keep you very entertained for a good while.

Thanks, but no. It's going to be robotic arm with gripper and camera. The rest can be either Raspberry Zero (for cam, control, with net or blutooth, something big for high level). Another option, not exclusive, NVidia Jetson Nano instead of Zero. It could be Raspberry Pi 3, but I don't want to do video processing on it. All this I have, just need to put them together. Adding AGX Orin will be a big thing. That's actually the goal. With video processing and LLM all in one mobile robot. As it's hobby R/D it will be configured and reconfigured many times. That's why I don't want to do low level by hand every time.

Another interesting option is Raspberry Pico * N + Tiny PC. For control and thinking. They can be connected via wifi or blutooth.

Re: Berkeley Humanoid Lite – Open-source robot

#32

What is the way to go in hobby robotics today? I'm more interested in high level, and want the lower level to 'just work' with minimum efforts from my side. Having mechanical part and vision what would be the right choice for low-middle software to control robotic arm and car, may be attached one to another. ROS2?

HuggingFace LeRobot. You can build the reference arm easily and cheaply and the software is designed to train AI. There's a lot to explore and extend there and the community is growing rapidly. It's based on the Stanford Aloha project. https://huggingface.co/lerobot

Re: Berkeley Humanoid Lite – Open-source robot

#33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’d say start with a sumo robot, line follower, or maze solver. That’ll keep you very entertained for a good while.

Thanks, but no. It's going to be robotic arm with gripper and camera. The rest can be either Raspberry Zero (for cam, control, with net or blutooth, something big for high level). Another option, not exclusive, NVidia Jetson Nano instead of Zero. It could be Raspberry Pi 3, but I don't want to do video processing on it. All this I have, just need to put them together. Adding AGX Orin will be a big thing. That's actua…

What kind of vision peocessing are you envisioning?

Re: Berkeley Humanoid Lite – Open-source robot

#34

What is the way to go in hobby robotics today? I'm more interested in high level, and want the lower level to 'just work' with minimum efforts from my side. Having mechanical part and vision what would be the right choice for low-middle software to control robotic arm and car, may be attached one to another. ROS2?

HuggingFace LeRobot. You can build the reference arm easily and cheaply and the software is designed to train AI. There's a lot to explore and extend there and the community is growing rapidly. It's based on the Stanford Aloha project. https://huggingface.co/lerobot

LeRobot is 6DoF.

How much does this matter in practice vs 7DoF arm?

Re: Berkeley Humanoid Lite – Open-source robot

#35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does that work for things like taking out the trash, doing dishes, and folding laundry?

Robots that take over the old fashioned traditional housewife job will cause an outrage.

Wait till they get access to the "MCP" for making tiktok content - "I'm a tradbot, and I like it!" / "You won't believe what this roomba did to my cleaning routine!" ...

Re: Berkeley Humanoid Lite – Open-source robot

#36
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HuggingFace LeRobot. You can build the reference arm easily and cheaply and the software is designed to train AI. There's a lot to explore and extend there and the community is growing rapidly. It's based on the Stanford Aloha project. https://huggingface.co/lerobot

LeRobot is 6DoF. How much does this matter in practice vs 7DoF arm?

Probably not much. Also the LeRobot reference arm (SO-ARM100) is 6DoF, but it's very hackable and there are already project with different grippers, etc.

Re: Berkeley Humanoid Lite – Open-source robot

#37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks, but no. It's going to be robotic arm with gripper and camera. The rest can be either Raspberry Zero (for cam, control, with net or blutooth, something big for high level). Another option, not exclusive, NVidia Jetson Nano instead of Zero. It could be Raspberry Pi 3, but I don't want to do video processing on it. All this I have, just need to put them together. Adding AGX Orin will be a big thing. That's actua…

What kind of vision peocessing are you envisioning?

3D reconstruction, from stereo or mono camera, have both. Object detection, text reading. Ideally it should recognize the speaker, simple gestures. Take audio, feed speech to LLM, get the output. Being able to detect and move out of the way of walking humans. Most of it has been done, like 3d structure and localization from motion. There are reference implementations. I've done it before too.

It's sort of open ended project. Having LLM with vision on mobile robot with arm.. has a lot of applications. AGX Orin 64GB is capable of running serious models.

Re: Berkeley Humanoid Lite – Open-source robot

#38
post #14

https://lite.berkeley-humanoid.org/static/comparision.png why does it say the Berkeley Humanoid is closed source here? Is it a typo, was this paper peer-reviewed?

The "Berkeley Humanoid" is a distinct robot (they have the "Berkeley Humanoid Lite" named "ours" and colored in orange as the rightmost point on their graph).

!!! hunter eye. thanks for clarification!

Re: Berkeley Humanoid Lite – Open-source robot

#39

As much as I like the concept, 3D printing everything is not the way to lower cost. Mass-produced (stamped / extruded / whatever) mechanical parts + hackable 'brains' is. Robots do lend themselves well w/ respect to that last part. Worst case is rip out its control electronics wholesale & replace with your own motor drivers etc.

As weird as it sounds, but carbon fiber is the most accessible material for making a DIY robot. Anything that uses metal requires expensive machinery. Carbon fiber is labor intensive (i.e. bad for mass manufacturing), but doesn't need much equipment beyond a curing oven for the epoxy (around $2000) for state of the art results.

Re: Berkeley Humanoid Lite – Open-source robot

#40
post #26

I was hoping "Lite" would be a smaller humanoid that I could build for <$5K, but this looks expensive.

I think “Lite” just means it’s a spin-off of the original Berkeley Humanoid — same core team, mostly. Honestly, they’re being pretty modest. “Berkeley Open Humanoid” would also be a good name since it highlights the open-source angle.

As for the $5K comment — depends where you’re coming from. My kid does VEX V5 and that budget barely covers a full field + comp-ready robots and enough spare parts to actually learn with. And those robots are tiny — one leg of this humanoid is probably bigger than the whole thing.

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