Berkeley Humanoid Lite
lastmod 2025-07-19created 2025-04-272 edits
Demonstrating Berkeley Humanoid Lite: An Open-source, Accessible, and Customizable 3D-printed Humanoid Robot
An open-source robot
About
- Berkeley Humanoid Lite is an open-source 3D-printed humanoid robot built for accessibility and customizability
- Can be built with just a 3D printer and off-the-shelf parts, for a total cost under $5,000
- Overcomes the durability limits of 3D-printed parts with a cycloidal gear design
- Developed a locomotion controller through reinforcement learning and achieved zero-shot transfer from simulation to real hardware
- All designs, code, and documentation are provided as open source, contributing to the democratization of humanoid robots
Berkeley Humanoid Lite overview
- Most commercial humanoid robots are expensive, closed, and proprietary
- This places major constraints on the advancement and democratization of humanoid technology
- To address this, Berkeley Humanoid Lite was developed with the goal of improving openness and accessibility
Design and features
- Uses modular 3D-printed gearboxes and robot body
- All parts can be bought on common e-commerce platforms and made with a desktop 3D printer
- Total hardware cost is kept under $5,000
- Adopts a cycloidal gear design to compensate for the weak durability of 3D-printed gearboxes
- Extensive testing was performed on the 3D-printed actuators to verify durability
Experiments and demonstrations
- Performed a Rubik's Cube manipulation experiment
- Demonstrated writing a name with a marker
- Played with blocks
- Demonstrated bipedal locomotion
- Developed a reinforcement learning-based locomotion controller
- Achieved zero-shot transfer of a policy trained in simulation to hardware
Performance comparison
- Proposes a metric for evaluating the cost efficiency of humanoid robots relative to performance
- The performance metric is computed as the average maximum torque of all actuated degrees of freedom (DoFs), normalized by robot size
- The performance metric divided by robot cost is defined as the performance-cost ratio
- Berkeley Humanoid Lite achieves a high performance metric at a cost under $5,000
Documentation
- [2504.17249] Demonstrating Berkeley Humanoid Lite: An Open-source, Accessible, and Customizable 3D-printed Humanoid Robot
- https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.17249