Charli

CHARLI is the United States’ first full-size autonomous 5-foot tall humanoid created at Virginia Tech. The term humanoid means that the robot was built to mimic the human body and movements. CHARLI is capable of walking in all directions as well as turning, kicking, and performing gestures and simple upper body manipulation tasks. CHARLI soon will be able to talk as well.

the autonomous humanoid available in two versions, the Lightweight that stands about 135cm (4′5″) tall, weighs 12.5kg (27.5 lbs), and has 20 degrees of freedom and the Heavy, which is a more sophisticated bot with different set of legs with actuators for better performance.

The students built CHARLI L with $20,000 in seed money from the Virginia Tech Student Engineers’ Council and donated equipment from National Instruments and Maxon Precision Motors. Work on the robot began in 2008 with 13 undergraduate and graduate students working on the project at any given time.

As the next generation of the CHARLI series humanoid robots, CHARLI-2 improves stability and speed in walking, intelligence and autonomy, and soccer playing skills. CHARLI-2 is also designed to participate in the autonomous robot soccer competition, RoboCup, in the Adult size league.

CHARLI-2 is honored “2011 Best Invention of the Year” by Time magazine, won the Louis Vuitton Best Humanoid Award (a.k.a. Louis Vuitton Cup) at RoboCup 2011, and won 1st place in AdultSize league for autonomous soccer at RoboCup 2011 (as well as many other awards). CHARLI is also focused on having fun. He started to be famous after dancing Gangnam Style’. he’s certainly got better moves than some other dancers of his kind, such as the Bieber Bot and Willow Garage’s PR2.