Researchers at places like Boston Dynamics and Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University have been building insanely advanced robots for years; however, these life-size humanoids are also insanely expensive. Aside from these professional-grade machines, a number of startups have been hard at work to bring open source, miniaturized droids to the everyday consumer. Falling somewhere in the middle of that spectrum is Zeus, the homebrew humanoid of Maker “LuisRobots.”
Like many of its other robotic counterparts, Zeus is capable of walking and speaking. Standing just shy of four feet (44”) tall and weighing 18 pounds, the bipedal bot boasts an all-metal body with a distinct mohawk, and is driven by an Arduino Mega (ATmega2560) and a Raspberry Pi 2.
Zeus is equipped with various electronic components, including an nRF24L01 transceiver module, a Bluefruit EZ-Link Shield for serial programming and communication, a BN055 for absolute orientation, servos for his hands, neck and legs, a 5A UBEC for regulating voltage, some distance sensors and a force-sensing resistor, all of which feed into the Arduino. Meanwhile, the Raspberry Pi 2 is tasked with handling Zeus’ webcam, speaker, microphone and Vantec sound card.
In terms of software, Zeus was programmed using Motion, the eSpeak speech synthesizer, Arduino IDE, Eclips IDE, VNC, PiAUISuite for voice recognition, Minicom and openCV. You can see the humanoid in all its glory below, and check out its Facebook page for more.