Miha: An Affordable Humanoid Platform for Research and Development

Abstract

The current paper introduces Miha, an affordable yet highly performant humanoid platform for research and development. The motivation behind the platform is to significantly lower the costs compared to similar offerings, democratizing access to humanoid robotics research and helping in the standardization of common control functions. The platform offers 22 degrees of freedom smart actuators, pressure sensors, inertial measurement units, stereo cameras, multiple microphones, speakers, and a convenient 2.4-inch liquid crystal display for the on-device user interface. It includes a unique dual hot-swap battery design that allows continuous operation in the field with best-in-class 3-hours autonomy on one charge. The presented version uses a Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 as the main controller and uses ROS Noetic. We demonstrate several control functions, including walking. The vast majority of hardware and software components are either off-the-shelf or provided as open-source.

Keywords

• Biped
• humanoid
• robot
• robot operating system