A Hands-On Approach to Humanoid Robots Education

This paper describes a novel approach to introduce early undergraduate and high schools to humanoid robotics. Instead of building a full humanoid robot, we start with the construction of a single leg, and analyze its kinematic and dynamic behavior. The approach is heavily based on writing various programs to solve and visualize the domains. We introduce and derive fundamental principles of the forward and inverse kinematics of a humanoid robot. The inverse kinematics are approximated using the Jacobian pseudo-inverse method. The control of the motion of a robot is introduced using the versatile PID controller. We designed two new challenge problems to motivate students with our exposition. First, a marble maze game is mounted on the leg and using their understanding of the kinematics, students implement a program to roll the ball from the start to the goal area. Secondly, we implement 1D and 2D ball balancing challenges for a ball on a plane. The paper finishes by introducing a set of modern web technologies that can be used to implement portable and efficient real-time control and simulation of robot systems.