In front of the abundance of human-like robots for sale, we take a look around and select fresh high-quality humanoid robotics kits and present them to you in a compact overview. Every release keeps you engaged and helps makers to learn and build experimental robots.
A new valuable kit found is PLEN2, a robotics base kit released by the PLEN Project Company from Japan. Currently, the humanoid kit is priced at $899 for the standard edition and will be released starting in March 2016. The PLEN2 kit contains the components, parts, and software needed to make it work.
Behind The Design
Open-source humanoid robots are hard to design and costly to build. However, it’s getting ever harder to make a customizable humanoid robot, and the uncomplicated solution is to use a 3D printer. Considering all of the above, PLEN2 is a printable open-source humanoid robot that anyone can easily build and personalize. Thus, you don’t need highly advanced electronics and mechanics skills, with just a screwdriver you can build this robot.
With over 30 different 3D designs for parts, you need to have some patience to print all of the robot components. All the files are provided for free download in STL format from this page. Anyone with ideas or an optimized solution can customize the data and print their own parts.
Finally assembled, your PLEN2 should have a tall of 7.87-inch and a weight of 21.16 oz.
Key Pieces
On design: PLEN2 features 18 freely movable joints and servo motors capable of providing stable movements. In fact, the movable joints and servo motors give the robot’s ability to walk, get up, roller skating and skateboarding.
On electronics: PLEN2’s servo motors (18 servo motors) are controlled by an Arduino-compatible controller with an Atmel ATmega32U4 microcontroller and a clock rate of 16Mhz. Besides servo motors, the printed body hosts a six-axis gyroscope and accelerometer sensor, a Bluetooth module and the battery.
On controlling: It should be easy to control PLEN2. You need a PC or a smartphone (Android or iOS). For the Android smartphone, the application is called “Scenography,” while for iOS is “PLEN Connect.”
The Price and Kits
PLEN2 will be released starting with March 2016. Thenceforward, you can put together the servo motors, control boards and accessories for your walking robot.
There are a number of possibilities for the PLEN2 kits (online shop):
Conclusion
There are multiple printable robot kits that showing interest for the DIY community. The work on designing a printable open-source humanoid robot can be measured only in the number of projects developed based on the PLEN2 platform. PLEN2 offers a structure simple and easy to build, an affordable platform, and the opportunity to build more intelligent robots.
Even More Humanoid Robot Kits!
Here are more articles with references to 13 humanoid robot kits we’ve managed to collect so far.
- The SainSmart’s Jr. Alpha 1S Humanoid Robot
- Homemade and Open-Source Humanoid Robot Projects: Trends and Examples
Last But Not Least
We are regularly looking for the most valuable humanoid robotics kits on the market. If you have plans to release a high-quality humanoid robot kit, please contact us at office@intorobotics.com — we would like to support you on Into Robotics.
