Asimov 1, an open-source humanoid with a Raspberry Pi 5 as its head

[u/eck72]

Hi r/raspberry_pi, Emre from Menlo Research.

We've been building Asimov 1, a humanoid robot made from off-the-shelf and 3D-printable parts, and we open-sourced everything we built. Its head runs on a Raspberry Pi 5, so I thought this would be a good place to share how we used it.

Asimov 1 has 2 computers. A Radxa CM5 in the torso handles the walking, the actuators and the IMU. That loop is time-sensitive, so we kept everything else away from it and gave it to the Pi.

The Pi 5 in the head runs the camera, the microphones and speaker, Wi-Fi and video streaming. It also serves the web console you open in a browser to set up, calibrate and drive the robot. The 2 computers talk over a 1 m Ethernet cable.

A few Pi-specific things we ran into along the way:

• The head stack is a head board under the Pi and a Media HAT on top, and the HAT is there partly to prevent Pi brownouts
• The camera connects over USB, not CSI
• The Pi has an RTC battery so it keeps time between power cycles
• The Pi starts its own access point for setup, and the password is on the QR code on the Pi's box, so don't throw the box away

Setup is the usual routine. Flash it with Raspberry Pi Imager, plug everything in, SSH in through the access point.

Everything is open (really!), from the mechanical CAD and electrical schematics to the simulation files, SDK, locomotion policy and training code, so people can build on top of it. The bill of materials is public too, so you can source the parts yourself and build one.

We're thinking about what else the Pi could take on, like on-device vision or local voice, and would love ideas from people who know the Pi better than we do.

Feel free to check out the repo with all the open-source files: https://github.com/menloresearch/asimov-1

We're also putting together a user manual for people who want to source the parts and build their own humanoid: https://docs.menlo.ai/asimov/1/overview

Love to share a few demos soon, so let me know if you'd like to see them.

[u/USS_Penterprise_1701]

Wow, I've seen a lot of posts of your progress on this and wouldn't have guessed it was a Pi 5 (or a Radxa CM5). Props on said progress, by the way. It's come a long way.

[u/Mead_Makes_Me_Mean]

I’d love to see some demos!!

[u/rsmithlal]

This is neat, but why do so many tech folks ironically/unironically name things? Asimov writing one of the great sci-fi books warning of the dangers of humanoid robots, and all....

[u/RunJumpJump → u/rsmithlal]

Which one was your favorite?