University of Southern California

The University of Southern California, a private university in Los Angeles founded in 1880, appears here for one lab: the Dynamic Robotics and Control Laboratory in the Viterbi School of Engineering, led by Quan Nguyen. Its humanoid HECTOR (Humanoid for Enhanced ConTrol and Open-source Research) is a small testbed for model predictive control and learning-based locomotion.

HECTOR is modular, splitting into arms, trunk and legs so it can run as a plain biped or as a full humanoid. Each leg has five degrees of freedom including an actuated ankle, and HECTOR V2, presented in a paper submitted on 19 December 2023 by Junheng Li, Junchao Ma, Omar Kolt, Manas Shah and Nguyen, adds four-degree-of-freedom arms. The V2 is 85 cm tall and 16 kg with a peak knee torque of 67 Nm. The paper shows it walking over uneven ground at 0.6 m/s while carrying up to 2.5 kg and recovering from pushes.

The open-source part is the software: simulation and control code in ROS and MATLAB on GitHub. Hardware designs are not published, and the machine has never been sold or deployed. A spin-off, LASER Robotics, has marketed HECTOR V2 as a research platform, but no pricing or unit numbers are public. USC's contribution is control methods, not hardware.