MEVITA: Open-Source Bipedal Robot Assembled from E-Commerce Components via Sheet Metal Welding

2025-08-25

AI Summary

Existing open-source bipedal robots face dual bottlenecks: 3D-printed designs suffer from dimensional constraints and structural fragility, while metal-based alternatives involve excessive part counts, procurement difficulties, and complex assembly. This work proposes a fully e-commerce-sourced, open-source bipedal robot design leveraging sheet-metal welding to realize a highly integrated monolithic chassis—reducing part count by over 70% and significantly enhancing rigidity and assembly efficiency. We introduce a “minimum viable biped” architecture, trained in Gazebo via reinforcement learning for stable gait generation, and deploy it on hardware using sim-to-real transfer. The prototype demonstrates robust locomotion across diverse terrains. All hardware schematics, control firmware, simulation environments, and trained models are publicly released under open-source licenses, enabling low-cost replication and community-driven extensibility.

Technology Category

• Intelligent Robots: Motion and Path Planning
• Humans and AI: Game Design — Virtual Humans, NPCs and Autonomous Characters
• Natural Language Processing: Safety and Robustness

Application Category

• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Experiences and lessons learnt from Web-based algorithms and system deployments
• Responsible Web: Machine-in-the-loop, human agency and autonomy
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Trust and reliance of crowd workers and data experts on GenAI

Abstract

Various bipedal robots have been developed to date, and in recent years, there has been a growing trend toward releasing these robots as open-source platforms. This shift is fostering an environment in which anyone can freely develop bipedal robots and share their knowledge, rather than relying solely on commercial products. However, most existing open-source bipedal robots are designed to be fabricated using 3D printers, which limits their scalability in size and often results in fragile structures. On the other hand, some metal-based bipedal robots have been developed, but they typically involve a large number of components, making assembly difficult, and in some cases, the parts themselves are not readily available through e-commerce platforms. To address these issues, we developed MEVITA, an open-source bipedal robot that can be built entirely from components available via e-commerce. Aiming for the minimal viable configuration for a bipedal robot, we utilized sheet metal welding to integrate complex geometries into single parts, thereby significantly reducing the number of components and enabling easy assembly for anyone. Through reinforcement learning in simulation and Sim-to-Real transfer, we demonstrated robust walking behaviors across various environments, confirming the effectiveness of our approach. All hardware, software, and training environments can be obtained from https://github.com/haraduka/mevita .

Problem

• Develops open-source bipedal robot using e-commerce components
• Reduces assembly complexity through sheet metal welding
• Enables robust walking via reinforcement learning transfer

Innovation

• Sheet metal welding for structural integration
• E-commerce sourced components for accessibility
• Reinforcement learning with Sim-to-Real transfer