SANPO Robot: Make Your Own Biped Humanoid Robot with Low Entry Barrier

Biped Humanoid robots are interesting to motivate students to learn interdisciplinary knowledge and skills of engineering and computer science. Most humanoid robots available in the market are so expensive that students cannot afford them. Moreover, those robots are usually limited to built-in functionalities. Students have great difficulty in modifying or extending the hardware/software functionalities of those robots. Several projects help students build their robots at a low cost. However, students or teachers need to 3D-print the robot parts to build the robots. 3D printing is time-consuming and possibly unstable, so preparing the 3D-printed robot parts is a challenging task. In this study, we design the SANPO robot for educational purposes with a low entry barrier. The SANPO robot has six degrees of freedom with two legs and two arms. We design the robot shell components by using the open-source FreeCAD software. Students easily modify the design if they want. Teachers and students easily prepare the parts of this robot by using laser-cut machines with acrylic sheets or medium-density fiberboards. The SANPO robot is easy to build with off-the-shelf electronic components such as Arduino, servo motors, and ultrasonic modules which are cheap and popular in the market. The robot is programmed with GUI-based and instruction-based development environments. The design is easy to modify and extend with other modules and functionalities, such as Bluetooth, infra-red, buttons, AI camera, and smartphone applications. We also design the relevant course about assembling and programming the robot. We have used the SANPO robot to teach more than 160 people, including students and teachers. All of them successfully built and programmed their robots. They also successfully modified the hardware and software, so that their robots perform various walk and dance actions, make various sounds and music, and perform various interesting tasks such as playing soccer, fighting with other robots, and walking out of a maze autonomously.