From wheels to legs
Humanoid revealed the prototype of its new HMND01 Alpha, which has now gained two legs, and there is an interesting point, different from most, this robot only obtained physical form after accumulating thousands of hours without simulation and, according to the company itself, it was already walking in less than 48 hours after assembly.
The change is notable, especially for those who knew the version on wheels, today focused on the logistics sector, the design is now different, the tall structure of 2.3 m and 300 kg gives rise to a body much closer to the human scale with just under 1.80 around 90 kg.
The load capacity is 15 kg distributed bimanually, powered by a set of vision, language and action running on Nvidia hardware and none of this would be possible without the arsenal of 29 degrees of freedom that allows robots a motor repertoire that no longer depends on perfect surfaces.
Simulation is the heart of this breakup.
There were 13,680 hours of virtual training, shaping the robot's balance and gait before any physical component left the workshop, the result appears in the classic push recovery test, the machine wobbles reorganizes the weight and recovers the center of mass as if it were solving a calculation in real time.
From there arise additional abilities such as walking in curves and moving laterally, and yes, still somewhat rigid, but already reaching a maximum speed of 1.5 m per second lower than the version on wheels, but infinitely more adaptable to stairs and uneven floors.
The engineering is not limited to the legs, the modular manipulation project allows alternating between a full five-fingered hand and a simple parallel claw, adapting the robot to delicate or repetitive tasks.
The demo shows the system holding an orange, balancing a cup and removing an item of clothing from a hook, this bipedal alpha fits in with a larger strategy, a family sharing the same artificial intelligence brain, but in different bodies. The robustness of wheeled platforms remains ideal for factories like Sheffler's, while the agility of the biped opens the way to more complex environments.
Humanoid makes it clear that this modularity is not just product evolution, it is architecture for the future.
