From feeling in the joints and skin of the hands to learning by listening, the number of problems to be solved with humanoid robots is so vast that it makes you wonder why anyone would even try. Casually friendly sci-fi robots always seem to be just on the horizon, and Christoph Korstall’s work is the best argument I’ve seen that it might become a reality. His robot Mona won a blue ribbon at Maker Faire Bay Area in 2023 and is back in 2024 to share his process and inspire future robot makers.
Christoph Kohstall has built an intelligent humanoid robot with human-level movement capabilities completely from scratch. Robots leverage large-scale language models to decide how to behave in unstructured environments. Our goals can be anything from home care work to helping people build an inspiring tomorrow.
welcome to the family
He begins his talk with an interactive demo that explores what kind of robots people actually want in their homes. The answer was a little more sinister than I expected, but still very human. So if you want to create tools to live with people, and want people to feel comfortable around them, a humanoid shape is a smart fit. There’s always danger lurking in the uncanny valley, but luckily manufacturers are working on building it. Friendly and interactive robot humanoid.
And if you build a robot that is humanoid in shape and generally useful for a variety of purposes, you probably want it to learn and react naturally. So he integrated a modern multimodal LLM that allows him to train not only from text but also from data such as video.
In his talk at the trade show, Kristof demonstrated the philosophy behind the robot and showed off some of its features. He even gets his family involved in the demonstration.
designed for people
This build intentionally uses low-budget parts with the goal of making humanoid assistive robots more accessible. The total BOM is still large. After all, he’s trying to build a larger-than-life human being. But the results speak for themselves.
If you’re wondering where your name is gentle humanoid Christophe’s background in physics gave him a unique perspective on the potential dangers of new technologies (It’s not the first time Because someone was worried about it), he wanted to focus on the positive. In his words, he gave talks “to motivate people to strive towards the inspirational side, so that they don’t get drawn into the wrong kind of applications just because they are well-rewarded.” He said he went.
This talk changed my mind about what the limits of the machine are and gave me hope for the teams that will make it happen.
