CHAMP — A low cost modular humanoid platform

A big void in current trend of research in robotics is the high cost of development, prototyping and production. This has impeded the accessibility to robotics research in schools and universities. To reduce the costs of robotics research, reduction in number of sensors and improvements in the software is desired. This has led to the penetration of the computer vision into the field of robotics. To keep in tune with the state-of-the-art robotic research which aims at building human-like robots or humanoids, in this paper we propose a low cost modular humanoid platform with nine degrees of freedom called Cognitive Humanoid Autonomous Modular Platform (CHAMP). Despite the simplicity in design, CHAMP can be deployed for testing some complex real world tasks like face detection and tracking.