Robotic Nation Evidence

Open-platform humanoid robot

Open PINO Platform

The idea behind the open PINO platform is to provide a humanoid robot chassis design that is "open", like LINUX is open. Researchers, engineers and inventors can access the design of this robot, use the plans freely, add to them, improve them and so on. The translation from Japanese is a little rough, but here's what the site has to say about this project:

Open PINO Platform is the project to accelerate the research and development of humanoid robots by providing the technical information of PINO open to the public. Everyone can use PINO as a base of the research and development, in other words, to foster PINO to be more sophisticated humanoid robot. We hope PINO to play the similar role as LINUX, for humanoid robot development.

You can build PINO from the plans, or buy a pre-built PINO chassis from a company called ZMP. Click here for photos and a movie of the ZMP product. The cost of the pre-built robot appears to be well below $50,000.

Because Honda has invested tens of millions of dollars in ASIMO, many people believe that humanoid robots will be extremely expensive and rare for the foreseeable future. This is not the case. The PINO platform, and others like it, show that inexpensive robotic platforms will be widely available to developers. The cost will be low enough for thousands of smaller businesses to get into the game. As computer power and vision algorithms become available, they will be deployed into robotic products quite rapidly and at low cost.