A student-led engineering design team building open-source bipedal humanoid robots — lowering the barrier to entry for the entire collegiate robotics community.
// Mission
Humanoid Robotics at Virginia Tech is a student-led engineering design team focused on bipedal humanoid robotics. Our vision is to build open-source bipedal robots and incentivize greater collegiate interest in humanoid robotics across the United States.
Our primary goal is to produce a tangible improvement to the state of low-end robotics. By documenting, open-sourcing, and maintaining everything we build, we lower the barrier of entry for students and institutions everywhere.
Taking inspiration from UC Berkeley's "Humanoid Lite" and other forming collegiate groups at Rutgers, Purdue, and beyond — we are developing a Large Robust Open-Source Humanoid Robot, following the conventional timeline of robotics hardware and software development.
🔓 All robots, code, documentation, and design files produced by this club are fully open-sourced and freely available to the community.
// Progress Log
A running record of the club's milestones, active workstreams, and what's coming next. Updated as we make progress.
Humanoid Robotics at Virginia Tech was officially chartered as a student engineering design team. Leadership structure established, sub-team leads recruited, and the club's open-source mission formally adopted.
Surveyed existing open-source humanoid efforts — including Berkeley Humanoid Lite, MIT Humanoid, and platforms from Purdue and Rutgers — to define the design direction and scope for our first robot.
Active CAD development of the robot's limbs, joints, and load-bearing structures. Actuator selection and configuration is ongoing, with a focus on quasi-direct drive joints for high torque density and backdriveability.
Building the simulation pipeline in Isaac Lab for training locomotion control policies. Target: zero-shot transfer of trained RL policies to the physical robot with no manual trajectory tuning.
Defining the robot's electronics stack: motor controllers, sensor integration, power distribution network, and real-time communication bus between all subsystems.
Integration of all mechanical, electrical, and software subsystems into the first complete physical robot. Target milestone: standing balance and basic stepping before end of semester.
Full public release of all CAD files, electronics schematics, firmware, RL training code, and build documentation. Any collegiate team should be able to replicate our robot from scratch.
// Platform
// Leadership
This team is growing. If you want a leadership role in a robotics org at the ground floor, reach out now.
// Open Positions
We are recruiting across all sub-teams right now. This is early-stage — your contributions will directly shape the robot and the club's direction. No prior humanoid robotics experience required.
Everything you build here will be open-sourced and used by students across the country. Your work has a direct impact beyond Virginia Tech.