Humanoid robots, even scaled-down ones, tend to be expensive. The Berkeley Humanoid Lite offers a more accessible and economical option by centering the design around 3D printed actuators that make up the bulk of the robot’s frame.

The actuators are made by combining motors with printed cycloidal gearboxes and an embedded magnetic encoder. They’re modular, so even if one has no desire to recreate the whole robot it might be worth checking out the actuator design details to see if they might be useful in some other way.

The Berkeley Humanoid Lite isn’t a finished product so much as an open-source, easily customized reference design. The GitHub repository contains everything one might need, and you can watch some basic demonstrations, including VR-driven teleoperation, in the video embedded below.

At a total hardware cost of under $5,000 USD it’s still expensive, but much more economical than other humanoid robots, open-source or not. As mentioned, even if one doesn’t plan to build one, the modular actuator design is worth keeping in mind for other purposes.