Humanoid Robot Lilli in Education and Research*

Robot Lilli was designed by a Norwegian artist, Per R. Ø. Salkowitsch, who presented the robot at Maker Faire in Vienna in 2018. It is a humanoid robot with 25 DOF built of plywood and low-cost motors. We purchased the wooden laser-cut planks with servo motors and drivers from the author and had our students build the robot on a robotics seminar course back in the autumn of 2018. We then designed and installed the control electronics and designed and implemented our own control software utilizing a simple microcontroller. It allows creating and debugging simple choreographies, produces audio output, and uses the IMU sensor for balancing. Since then, the robot has been used in various educational and research settings and enabled with 3D vision and a powerful NVidia computer. A simulated model has been implemented, including an inverse-kinematics module in a master’s thesis [13], and we have recently successfully evolved a walking pattern for this robot in simulation [14]. Currently, the robot is used in one ongoing master’s thesis and one bachelor’s thesis, where results are transferred from the simulation to the real world. In this article, we summarize our work and experiences.