We have built the environment (living space, apartments, vehicles) that is suitable for two legged systems. It is predicted that robots will be with us in our daily life sharing our space and resources (power, bandwidth and space). Nature has shown the way where the most successful species on this planet has two legs. And, the robots that may have to live with us in due course of time should be two legged (?). Or should we redesign our living space suitable for wheeled robots?

The most challenging issue with humanoids is to balance on two legs. Humans are capable of doing all kinds of acrobatics with two legs. We have muscles (assisting us along various activities) and the body is flexible. Research along material science (flexible body, muscles, actuators), nano technology (smaller and lighter sensors and actuators), computational intelligence (fuzzy logic, neural-networks, learning – genetic algorithms, evolutionary algorithms), should be assimilated into and mastered to design better systems. 

Indigenously developed several biped humanoid robots (CREO, MaNUS and GeNUS). These robots are capable of walking on rough terrains and to climb steps. The robots are equipped with a CMOS vision camera (to track objects), an IR sensor (to avoid obstacles), a digital compass (to keep track of the navigational direction), a tilt sensor (to keep the body steady) and force sensors under the foot (for force feedback). The gait control and sensor fusion are done on two DSP boards.

Engadget portal featured the MaNUS humanoid in 2005. Engadget is widely considered as the CNN of Technology.

The design and development of humanoid robots were carried out with the following points in mind:

1. The primary objective was to initiate a research direction on the legged robot systems with an aim to subsequently develop a prototype 3D humanoid biped robot that integrates various technologies.
2. The humanoid can be used as a platform for various benchmarks and multi-agent engineering problems.

Building a two-legged robot is by nature a multidisciplinary venture: fields that may be integrated include robotics, mechanics, locomotion, sensor fusion, intelligent control, communication, image processing, mechatronics and computer technology. The biped robot facilitates research in these areas (and possibly in hereto unforeseen areas that may arise when these fields are integrated), and at the same time, symbolizes the results of the research itself.

Legged robots have distinct advantages over their wheeled counterparts when working in arbitrarily complex terrains - they can generally cross obstacles more easily, and exhibit greater adaptability. These features are important in several applications such as exploration, maintenance, intervention and service. These application domains are beyond the realm of traditional manufacturing robots. Bipeds are especially interesting because humans are two-legged, and places meant to be occupied by humans, such as homes and offices, may soon be co-inhabited by both humans and humanoids in the not distant future. As machines and especially Humanoids are to become more commonplace phenomena in our lives (which is clearly the trend), the technology of two-legged robotic locomotion in arbitrary environments must be mastered thoroughly.

The Humanoid can serve as an effective platform to test out several control strategies and algorithms. The mechanical structural development is quite involved bringing in new challenges in locomotion research.