If you have scrolled through tech news lately, you have probably noticed the same thing I have. A new video drops almost every week showing a humanoid robot walking through a warehouse, sorting boxes, or folding laundry. It raises a question I hear constantly from readers: why do companies build human shaped robots when wheels, … Read more
Humanoid robots vs wheeled robots comes down to this: wheeled robots win on efficiency and cost for most real-world tasks, while humanoid robots win on terrain adaptability and human-compatible environments. I have spent the last three months comparing both types across warehouses, factory floors, and home labs, and the answer is rarely one-size-fits-all. This guide … Read more
The iCub research robot is an open-source, child-sized humanoid platform developed by the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT) for studying embodied cognition and artificial intelligence. Standing 104 cm tall and weighing about 22 kg, iCub has 53 actuated degrees of freedom, full-body tactile sensing, and a fully open hardware and software stack. In this guide, … Read more
When I first saw a Pepper robot greet shoppers at a mall in Tokyo, I was surprised by how naturally it tilted its head and asked how my day was going. That moment captures exactly what the Pepper robot was designed to do. In this guide, I’ll walk you through what the Pepper robot is, … Read more
NAO is a small, programmable humanoid robot originally created by Aldebaran Robotics and now maintained by Maxvision Technologies (Maxtronics), used worldwide in education, scientific research, and healthcare. As of , more than 13,000 NAO units are active in 70+ countries, making it the most widely deployed educational humanoid robot on the market. I first ran … Read more
If you have ever searched “What happened to Sophia the robot,” you are not alone. Speculation about her being shut down, replaced, or quietly retired has been circulating online for years. The short answer: Sophia is still active in . She has not been “killed,” discontinued, or shelved by her creators at Hanson Robotics. The … Read more
When I first watched a humanoid robot greet a child by name in a Tokyo hospital, I had a quiet realization: the future of human-robot interaction had quietly slipped out of the lab and into the hallway. That moment captures the heart of social robotics, a field I have followed closely over the past decade. … Read more
Human Robot Interaction (HRI) is the interdisciplinary field of study focused on how humans and robots communicate, collaborate, and share physical spaces. Our team has followed HRI research for years, and we have seen this area grow from a niche academic topic into a discipline shaping healthcare, manufacturing, and daily life. This guide breaks down … Read more
Robots understand spoken commands through a multi-step pipeline that turns your voice into action: microphones capture sound waves, automatic speech recognition (ASR) converts audio into text, natural language processing (NLP) figures out what you mean, and motion planning software decides what the robot should physically do. In short, a voice command is captured, transcribed, interpreted, … Read more
Whole body control in robotics is a control approach that coordinates all joints and links of a robot simultaneously to achieve task-space objectives while maintaining balance and satisfying physical constraints. Instead of telling each motor what to do one at a time, the controller thinks about the whole robot as one system working toward a … Read more