16-264: Humanoids
Spring 2025
Instructor: Chris Atkeson, cga@cmu.edu, Youtube channel
TA: Tairan He, tairanh@andrew.cmu.edu
Class time: MW 3:30-4:50PM
Place: GHC 4211
TA Office hours: Fridays 4pm-4:45pm in Wean Hall 1311 and by zoom
The office hour for this week (January 24) will be held online only via Zoom. For all future sessions, office hours will take place both online and in person unless otherwise notified.
Piazza
Units: 12

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2025: Course Format.

• This is a project course.
• One goal is for projects to interoperate and persist beyond the end of the course. A great outcome would be a set of web pages telling others how to do the projects.
• We will use class time for presentations by you and the instructors, discussions, work, and group meetings with instructors.
• We will let projects drive the presentations. There is no fixed schedule or syllabus. Let our interests shape the course.
• There will be some assignments intermixed with working on the projects.

Possible Class and Project Topics

• Robot Companions: Humanoids: Benefits and Risks 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 eldercare-bots, nanny-bots, teacher-bots, sex-bots, www.robotcompanion.ai
• How can robots help us now? Rise of robots hastened by coronavirus, CORONAVIRUS OUTBREAK: BEST TEST TO ANALYZE THE FUTURISTIC CAPABILITIES OF TECHNOLOGY
  • Connecting people. Belgian video-calling robots to keep elderly connected during coronavirus
  • Care for older adults and people with disabilities living alone.
  • Home logistics, grocery delivery, ...
  • Automate lab tests
  • Clean equipment for re-use.
  • Clean and sterilize hospital rooms, other contaminated areas. Coronavirus: Robots use light beams to zap hospital viruses, These robots are fighting the coronavirus in China by disinfecting hospitals, taking temperatures, and preparing meals
  • Automate simple medical operations. Measure people's temperature during daily life. "The machine consists of a robotic arm on wheels that can perform ultrasounds, take mouth swabs and listen to sounds made by a patient's organs, usually done with a stethoscope.", Thailand hospitals use 'ninja robots' to fight coronavirus
  • Fully automate some types of hospitals, quarantine areas. What America can learn from China's use of robots and telemedicine to combat the coronavirus, Coronavirus: Hospital ward staffed entirely by robots opens in China Coronavirus care at one hospital got totally taken over by robots
  • Robots And Drones Are Now Used To Fight COVID-19
  • IEEE Spectrum: Coronavirus Pandemic: A Call to Action for the Robotics Community
  • Drug discovery and testing
  • Public education, quarantine and other restriction enforcement, public surveillance
  • News filtering
  • If Robots Steal So Many Jobs, Why Aren't They Saving Us Now?
  • Robotic supply chains for a post-pandemic world
  • The most ridiculous ways companies are trying to profit from the coronavirus outbreak
  • 'Naturally antibacterial': Sex doll companies trying to cash in on coronavirus
• Manipulation: What do we do with our hands?
• Dynamics: Understanding physics.
• Simulation: Modeling and predicting what will happen.
• Planning: Deciding what should happen.
• Design and Building: Creating capabilities.
• Sensing: Knowing what is happening.
• Where am I: Sensor processing and fusion,
• Control: Reacting to what actually happens.
• Learning: Getting better with experience.
• Recognition: object, face, and gesture recognition
• Communication: speech recognition, dialog,
• Skills: reinforcement learning. Legs.
• Personality and Emotion.
• Personal agents: Siri, Alexa, Google Home.
• Books, movies, TV shows, and games: What inspires us and shapes our thinking about robots?
• Artificial people and playmates. Entertainment robots.
• Safety
• Ethics and policy: What are the implifications of robotics? What should we do about them? Jobs, weapons, social and behavioral, ...

Project

See course format (above) and the deadlines in the schedule (below). We will work out the project topics together. You can work in groups or alone. The "deliverables" include a web page along the lines of an instructables web page explaining how others could do your project and improve on your results. You will also present your project, and ideally the presentation should be made public as part of your web page. There will be intermediate deliverables including draft web pages and practice presentations.

Events

Videos

• Ameca and Azi having a chat, Ameca and Azi: Guessing game
• Humanoid Robot Trends to Watch in 2025
• Best Robots at CES 2025 (Not)
• Top 10 NEW Humanoid Robots of 2024 (Updated)
• Why Nvidia, Tesla, Amazon And More Are Betting Big On AI-Powered Humanoid Robots
• Nvidia GROOT vs. Tesla Optimus: Competing Paths to Humanoid Robots
• Chinese humanoids

Of Interest

• CES 2025 (last week)

Assignments

• Assignment 0: Due Jan 21. Send email to Chris and Tairan: Who are you? Why are you here? Done any robotics? Any ideas about the project you want to do? ("I don't know what project I want to do." is okay.) What topics would you like the course to cover? Google and send us some interesting URLs.
  Be sure your name is obvious in the email, and you mention the course name or number in the subject line. We teach more than one course, and a random email from robotlover@cs.cmu.edu is hard for us to process.

  ---

• Assignment 1: Due Jan 28. Work with some kind of sensor. Do something cool and fun. Examples: The microphone input of your computer. A mouse, touchpad, or touchscreen. A webcam. The microphone or camera on your phone. The touchscreen, GPS, or accelerometer of your phone. I recommend looking for existing software on the web, or apps.
  What do I turn in? Your group should make a web page and give a presentation.

  (Google "what can i do with sensors on my phone" and "... iphone") to get ideas.

• Pedometer App Using Android Studio , Haine Cho and Chris Choi
• What Makes You Humanoid, Justine Olshan
• COMPUTER VISION, Gabriel Magendzo and Max Dunaevschi

This is meant to be a fun assignment, so try not to stress out over it too much!