Cheap robots for all

Spinout companies are making humanoid robotic technology developed by Japan’s National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) affordable to researchers and hobbyists.

General Robotix and Moving Eye worked with Pirkus Robotix and Dai Nippon Technical Research Institute to develop the bipedal Transformer-like robot dubbed "HRP-2m Choromet”.

Choromet is 35cm high, weighs 1.5kg, and has 20 degrees of freedom. It has triaxial force/torque sensors on its legs and an accelerometer and a gyroscope on its trunk. It also has a small, energy-saving controller that is driven in real-time by ARTLinux.

Choromet is based on AIST’s HRP-2 Promoet, which has been extensively used in academic R&D. Promoet never achieved widespread use because of its prohibitive price of over £50,000. Choromet was developed to enable the use of high-level research results like OpenHRP and ARTLinux with low-cost robots.

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