CHARLI is a Humanoid Autonomous Robot with learning
intelligence made by Virginia Tech engineering students in 2009. CHARLI is able
of walking in all directions and even performing motions and upper body
manipulation tasks. The making of CHARLI first started as a research project
for improving the capabilities of humanoid robots. Since 2009 various
improvements added to the original CHARLI. The first robot called CHARLI-L (L
for lightweight). It had a weight of 12.4 kg and walking speed of 0.8 km/h. in
2010 CHARLI nominated as America’s first true humanoid robot by Popular Science
due to its biological design and similarity to humans. CHARLI-2 is the new
version of CHARLI that has more stability, speed in walking (1.4 km/h) and
learning intelligence. The new improvement that has added to the CHARLI-2 is
the soccer playing skill as it was designed to participate in the autonomous
robot soccer competition or RoboCup. CHARLI-2 has won the Louis Vuitton Best
Humanoid Award at RoboCup 2011 and honored as 2011 Best Invention of the Year
by Time magazine. To see the ability of this robot, you just need to watch the
video below and see how CHARLI dances with the Gangnam Style song. Really
amazing and I think it even dances better of some of us! For more information about CHARLI you can check RoMeLa (Robotics and Mechanisms Laboratory) and Virginia Tech engineering websites.
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