Hacker Remix

Berkeley Humanoid Lite – Open-source robot

190 points by ratsbane 13 hours ago | 17 comments

RetroTechie 3 hours ago

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.

abeindoria 2 hours ago

Hm, perhaps not - but maybe give the users an option to print such parts, and warn that they may affect longevity of said parts if they do decide to go full manufacturing route.

My potential concern is the "Apple" gatekeeping of parts.

taneq 10 minutes ago

It depends what you're doing. High volume parts, absolutely. It's one of the things that bugs me about the "3D printers printing printers" type projects. 3D printing is terrible for mass producing parts. If you're making 1000+ of something, injection mold it.

Low volume, probably customized parts like R&D robotics tends to need? 3D printing is great, especially if the design files are available so you can modify the parts as required before printing. And then if you break something you can print another one off overnight instead of stalling your project for weeks waiting for new parts to arrive.

larodi 3 hours ago

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?

bjackman 3 hours ago

I think this is a great idea. It seems like we are entering the phase where the core hardware problems are solved and we now need to:

A) bring down cost and expand the design space for the hardware and

B) minimise the barriers to working on the "software" problems where there still seem to be huge areas of mostly unaddressed challenges.

An open source platform seems like a good thing for both.

frainfreeze 11 hours ago

the cost-effectiveness/performance factor benchmark is interesting, but it feels slightly misleading - I just don't see how "average peak torque of all actuated DoFs, normalized by the robot's size" is related to measuring "accessibility and customizability" of the robot.

abdullahkhalids 10 hours ago

What is interesting is that on their own metric, the Berkley Humanoid is only twice as expensive as the Berkley Humanoid Lite but has more than twice the "performance factor" (0.36 vs 0.14).

It shows they threw away too much while creating the lite version.

4ndrewl 4 hours ago

Depends on the relative market size for performance factor though. If 90 percent of the market is captured by a 0.14 performance factor then that extra in price could be put towards solving another problem.

kaonwarb 9 hours ago

Rather, I think we can say based on those datapoints that for their design, performance scales superlinearly with cost. Not surprising given fixed costs!