Berkeley Humanoid Lite

Berkeley Humanoid Lite is an open-source, sub-$5,000 humanoid robot from UC Berkeley's Hybrid Robotics lab — a full 22-DOF biped (12 leg joints + 10 arm joints) built around modular, fully 3D-printed cycloidal gearboxes and widely available off-the-shelf parts. It was created to democratize humanoid-robotics research: every actuator is printed and hand-assembled, the electronics are commodity, and the entire software stack — RL policy training, sim-to-sim/sim-to-real, teleoperation, and low-level control — is open.

The robot walks (bipedal locomotion via a learned RL policy), and with its two 5-DOF arms and grippers it performs bimanual manipulation: solving a Rubik's cube, writing with a marker, and stacking blocks. Perception and control run on an onboard x86 mini-PC; joints connect over CAN bus through custom STM32 (B-G431B-ESC1) motor controllers running the open "recoil" firmware, with a BNO085 IMU for balance.

What this orobot program is

This is a browser-based learning interface and entry point. The in-page 3D viewer shows the robot's per-link meshes, and the Robot Operator panel drives the 22 joints through poses and demo sequences (stand, wave, squat, march) so you can understand the kinematic layout. It is not the balancing locomotion controller — that lives in the low-level repo below. Use this to learn the layout, then dive into the source to build and deploy the real thing.

Build it for real

• Paper (arXiv 2504.17249): https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.17249
• Project site: http://lite.berkeley-humanoid.org/
• Build docs (GitBook): https://berkeley-humanoid-lite.gitbook.io/docs
• Video: https://youtu.be/dIdJGkMDFl4
• Main repo (training + deploy): https://github.com/HybridRobotics/Berkeley-Humanoid-Lite
• Low-level control (CAN + RL runtime): https://github.com/HybridRobotics/Berkeley-Humanoid-Lite-Lowlevel
• CAD / URDF / MJCF / STL assets: https://github.com/HybridRobotics/Berkeley-Humanoid-Lite-Assets

Highlights

• 22 DOF — two 6-DOF legs + two 5-DOF arms, all identical modular actuators
• Fully 3D-printed actuators — cycloidal gearboxes in PLA around a MAD M6C12 BLDC motor
• Commodity BOM — ~$189 per actuator; sub-$5,000 for the whole robot
• URDF / MJCF / USD descriptions included — sim-ready in Isaac Lab & MuJoCo
• RL locomotion + bimanual manipulation — trained policies (ONNX) ship in the repo

Attribution

Created by Yufeng Chi, Qiayuan Liao, Junfeng Long, Xiaoyu Huang, Sophia Shao, Borivoje Nikolic, Zhongyu Li, and Koushil Sreenath (UC Berkeley Hybrid Robotics). Code licensed MIT; hardware/CAD assets licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. This program mirrors their open-source project as a learning entry point — all credit to the original authors.