SRM Team Humanoid

Three 20-DoF humanoids, and India's first RoboGames gold medal

I joined SRM Team Humanoid as an undergraduate and led it in my final year. The team was new and under-resourced — in my first year we had six Dynamixel actuators, not enough to build a single biped. Harder than the missing hardware was the missing guidance: nobody at the university worked on humanoid robotics, so I learned what I needed from MOOCs, textbooks, and papers. I spent months trying to make a biped walk and watched it stumble, fall, and crash instead.

Why do bipeds fall? So we can learn and build better walking algorithms.

As team lead I spearheaded the development of three 20-DoF humanoid robots:

  • Shadow and Ghost — the twins
  • Charlie — a fully 3D-printed 20-DoF interactive humanoid with an onboard chatbot

Results

  • RoboGames 2017, San Francisco — I led the team to India’s first gold medal, in the autonomous humanoid penalty kick event, along with Silver (humanoid freestyle), Silver (biped race), and Bronze (RC humanoid sumo).
  • RoboGames 2015, San Francisco — Bronze medal.
  • Third place, Humanoid Application Challenge (Robot Magic), IROS 2017, Vancouver.
  • My graduation project on humanoid teleoperation was named Best Graduation Thesis in the department and was accepted for poster presentation at IROS.

Most importantly, by the end I had a walking algorithm that actually worked robustly — which mattered more to me than any of the medals.

  • Real-Time Teleoperation of a Humanoid Robot with Motion Imitation and Legged Locomotion — ICARM 2018
  • Dynamic Lateral Balance of Humanoid Robots on Unstable Surfaces — ICEECCOT 2017
  • Dynamic Whole-Body Imitation of Human Motions in Humanoid Robot — IROS 2017 (poster)

Other projects from this period included a humanoid that played tic-tac-toe, a humanoid that autonomously rose after a fall, a gesture-controlled robotic arm using an Xbox Kinect for depth processing and inverse kinematics, and a serial-manipulator plotter arm.