India’s 1st humanoid by BITS students

India has developed its first ever humanoid, thanks to the efforts of students from Birla Institute of Technology and Science (BITS), Pilani.

A humanoid robot is a robot having an overall appearance based on the human body and is created to imitate the same physical/mental tasks that humans perform daily. A new approach of creating humanoid robots is the branch of Biomechanics.

The Indian Humanoid is named AcYut-4.

The AcYut team consisted of Tushar Agarwal, Apoorv Shrivastava, Deepak Gopinath and Dhairya Seth. The team leader, a third year Mechanical engineering student, Akash Gupta, had the following information about the AcYut-4: “The robot can walk long distances, bend and pick up things, climb stairs and detect objects. It can even play autonomous soccer”. The robot has an autonomous weight-lifting record in its category and has even performed at the Robogames 2011 held in San Francisco a month ago.

The name AcYut is derived from the Sanskrit word “Achyut” meaning “one who never falls”. The 4 in the name indicates that this is the 4th in the series of robots built by the team. The team started by building a prototype biped with scrape aluminium and old motors in the robotics lab in BITS, Pilani. In the subsequent versions, the team improved the vision and object detection algorithms. They also worked on the enhancement of the design of AcYut’s torso and gave it a stable walking algorithm with the use of inertial measurement unit (IMU). The team found it “humongously challenging” to make a two-legged robot walk. Also challenging was the vision development that the team had to perfect for getting the humanoid fit to participate in the soccer competition Robocup Iran 2011. 

The development of automatons and humanoids can be traced back centuries ago. Leonardo da Vinci designed a humanoid automaton in 1495.

Today Humanoids are used extensively in factories, and as a research tool in several scientific areas.