Tomotaka Takahashi wanted his robots to able to jump so he created a new humanoid robot that can jump 3″ high. At 14″ tall, that’s about 1/4 of its total body height, which is impressive. The robot can also “run” and can turn in place quickly. The bot uses Raytron’s BSRM01-01E voice recognition chip which allows for speaker-independent word recognition. Right now ROPID can understand about 8 words and phrases from about 3 meters away. But it’s a work in progress as it has trouble with certain questions, like “What is your name?”.

ROPID is definitely on the cute side as far as design. The head has a lower jaw which moves when it speaks and the hands have moving fingers. The bot has 29 degrees of freedom in all.

[Plastic-Pals]