Jianren Wang, Letian Qian, Zikai Wang +4cs.RO cs.AI
Developing humanoid robots capable of leveraging human behavioral data is essential for general-purpose embodiment, yet conventional development remains bottlenecked by a decoupled paradigm that isolates hardware design from whole-body control. This approach leads to suboptimal systems that compromise human-like fluidity and agility. To bridge this gap, we introduce a data-driven morphology-control co-design framework that optimizes humanoid morphology for human-like movement. To quantify morphological fidelity, we also introduce a novel metric that jointly considers kinematic retargeting fidelity to human motion and dynamic tracking performance. Our framework achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance across all metrics compared to baseline humanoids (Bumi, K1, and Toddlerbot). Finally, we realize this design in Bridge, an open-source, 88cm-tall humanoid platform released alongside its control policy. We demonstrate that Bridge captures human motion data with superior fidelity, exhibiting exceptional performance across foundational locomotion, robust balance, and highly dynamic maneuvers. Videos and open-source materials: https://sites.google.com/view/bridgerobot.
Humanoid robots have become increasingly popular in applications such as social interaction, education, and service roles, which drives the need for more natural and efficient human-robot interactions. However, currently available humanoid heads often face limitations, including high costs, mechanical complexity, and limited adaptability across diverse environments. To address these challenges, we present an articulated humanoid robot head designed for a receptionist role, integrating a mechanical structure with 21 degrees of freedom (DoF), including mechanisms for the mouth, eyes, eyebrows, and neck, and covered with realistic silicone skin to achieve a human-like appearance and expression. The system integrates a model-based architecture that combines SCRFD, ArcFace, and ByTetrack for face recognition and Llama and Whisper for natural language processing, with hardware support enabling real-time operations and human re-identification. The conversational ability and re-identification capabilities of the humanoid robot head were quantitatively measured, while its emotional expressiveness and human likeness were evaluated through a user study, achieving an average human likeness score of 4.13 out of 5.
Carson Kohlbrenner, Niraj Pudasaini, William Xie +3cs.RO cs.LG
Collision-free motion is often aided by tactile and proximity sensors distributed on the body of the robot due to their resistance to occlusion as opposed to external cameras. However, how to shape the sensor's properties, such as sensing coverage; type; and range, to enable avoidant behavior remains unclear. In this work, we present a reinforcement learning framework for whole-body collision avoidance on a humanoid H1-2 robot and use it to characterize how sensor properties shape learned avoidance behavior. Using dodgeball as a benchmark task, we ablate the properties of sensors distributed across the upper body of the robot and find that raw proximity measurements can substitute for explicit object localization provided the sensing range is sufficient and that sparse non-directional proximity signals outpace dense directional alternatives in sample efficiency.