About VoxHead
Q&A
Here is a compilation of answers to some common questions about VoxHead
The desktop VoxHead robot is a customizable, 3D printed, life-sized humanoid robot head that you build yourself. The desktop VoxHead can be extended to have a full torso and robot arms and robot hands, and eventually maybe legs. The robot was originally developed as a low cost yet serious teaching tool, and for conducting embodied cognitive science and human-robot speech interaction research. Now that we are opening up the VoxHead robot for general use, we imagine a countless number of potential projects to sprout from it. We are looking forward to seeing what you come up with!
VoxHead is designed for beginners through experts in both hardware and software. VoxHead has something to offer everyone who is interested in working with humanoid robots. Assembling a VoxHead requires a little soldering and related skills. A smart high school student with little mechanical or software experience should be able to build a VoxHead robot and get it to produce custom behaviors.
This web site is meant as a software-hardware-electronics support center for the VoxHead Developer Community. The Members Area of this web site (coming soon! once beta testing is over) is where developers, including our team, can talk to each other and give feedback and guidance to new users. The Members Area also includes the 3D print (.stl) files, software, design tips, scripts, pictures, news, and video tutorials to solve most any build problems, all in one place.
It currently costs around $500 for the electrical components and hardware needed to build a desktop VoxHead. This does not include the 3D printed parts or the SoC computer (Raspberry Pi or Jetson Orin Nano) or computer add-ons like monitor, keyboard, mouse, NVMe drive. There is free VoxHead software to configure and tune the robot, and other free VoxHead software to program the robot to talk and behave. The minimal version of VoxHead, called “Cyclops” costs maybe $150 to build (?), and can be upgraded through a series as budget and interests allow. We are working on a commercial version of the software, which will include some third party commercial technologies. Please stay tuned for more information on this, and how much the commercial software will cost.
Printing the parts on the Bambu A1 Mini takes about four or five days of continuous printing, if printing the parts individually, and doing the big parts, like the face, overnight. To look good, the big parts (e.g. face, head top) are the exterior parts and need to be sanded and painted. That takes an hour or two per day over a few days, with multiple paint coats and sanding between coats. For assembly, probably give yourself between a week of [full time] work or a month of tinkering more slowly and recovering from mistakes. Some of our beta testers have taken over six months to build one, but not as a full-time project. Setting up your SoC computer, calibrating motors, setting preferences, can take a few hours or a week. Learning the scripting language is pretty fast, but learning to write software plugins will take longer, depending on your existing software engineering skills.
The VoxHead robot was created by computer science professor, Michael Brady, as a teaching tool. Please stay tuned for more information about him and our team on the ‘about us’ page of this site (at some point, when that page gets created).
We find that most humanoid robotics software out there today is sub-optimal, to put it nicely. So Dr. Brady wrote his own ‘epi-operating system’ and software from scratch. The VoxHead robot’s epi-operating system is a program called VoxShell that runs on top of Linux (for Raspberry Pi 5 or Jetson Orin Nano). VoxShell essentially manages resources for running programs on the robot, and interfacing the robot with other computers. VoxHead software includes a suite of GUI-based utilities for calibrating motors, configuring speech parameters, tuning vision parameters, and for adjusting various other settings. VoxHead software also includes an interpreter for a robot interaction scripting language, where users can quickly build interactive robot behaviors. A sequencer is also included for generating and editing ‘pre-coordinated’ robot gestures and movements.
You can download the .stl files from the Members Area of this web site. All of the VoxHead 3D print files (.stl files) are copyrighted with a general use license similar to the Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0 license. You can find the full license here (or a link on the footer of this page). In short, you are not allowed to use the VoxHead design or derivatives of it for commercial purposes without first getting permission. The main difference between our license and a general CC license is that we do not grant the right for you to share the .stl files. That is, we do not want you to post the files or their derivatives on 3rd party websites for download, especially for profit. Please send people who want the files to our website. We are trying to build a community.
The quick answer is no, VoxHead’s main software is not [currently] open source, but it is free to download and use from the Members Area of this website. We do provide lots of template code for developing software plugins and scripts.
Absolutely! There are a number of ways to customize a VoxHead robot – both in terms of hardware and software. For example, you can give it the face of your favorite person by designing a 3D printed face (instruction video on how to do this will be available at some point). You can also design other 3D parts as needed, and share your designs with other VoxHead users. You can also swap out various components, like what computer or cameras or microphone or motor controller(s) you want to use. You can also write your own VoxHead software plugins for generating custom VoxHead skills, and write scripts for defining custom VoxHead speech and motor interactions.
Yes. The cameras located in the ‘eyes’ of VoxHead are IMX219 cameras. These are 8 megapixel CSI cameras that ‘plug directly’ into the CPU of the Raspberry Pi or Jetson Nano series of SoC (system-on-a-chip) computers. Another option is to use OV2640 cameras for the ‘eyecams.’ These cameras work with the ESP32 boards, and can be converted to USB to be used by a computer that doesn’t have CSI ports. The eyecams are usually for dedicated visual interaction tasks, like face or object tracking. It is still a rather unique experience today to have a humanoid robot ‘make eye contact’ with you the way that a person does. A third high-resolution camera is used in the torso. This camera is good for more traditional visual scene analysis tasks, when camera movements are not appropriate.
Not without our permission. But we are very enthusiastic about people using VoxHead for their businesses and side hustles! Please contact us before pursuing any business plans based on any of our designs and-or software. We want to work with you! We also want to protect VoxHead from bad publicity and from any legal problems.
Not without our permission. But we want to work with you! Please contact us before pursuing any business plans based on our designs. We hope to set up a ‘digital bazaar’ on this web site where developers can share and sell their [tested and verified] software plugins and scripts and VoxHead-related 3D print designs.
We consider funded research (for publication or otherwise) and using the VoxHead for teaching a course or courses that charge fees, to be commercial uses that go against our non-commercial license. But we want to work with you! We consider use in public funded secondary schools and non-for-profit organizations to be non-commercial. If you are at a university or a for-profit school, please contact us about a license agreement and any potential legal issues.
This is a question only you can answer. The VoxHead robot was designed to be 3D printed using FDM (‘hobby’) printers, with a print area of at least 18x18x18 cm. This is generally the size of ‘mini’ printers, such as the Bambu A1 Mini. If you want to develop or improve your 3D printing skills, the VoxHead system has a good diversity of parts to practice with. It takes about 1.25 rolls of filament to print the parts yourself for a desktop VoxHead.
No, we are not hiring. But we are interested in working with entrepreneurs. Please check back. If we ever do start hiring, we would mainly only be interested in people who have already built their own VoxHead.
We have arms and hands in development. They should be ready for beta testing soon.
We recommend to use the Orin if you plan to do much computer vision processing that integrates with motor control. That processing needs to be done locally, on the robot – as the Orin has a GPU, but the Raspberry Pi does not. AI chatbot integration can be done with cloud-based tools, and therefore an Orin or Raspberry would both be fine for that. If you want to do AI chatbot stuff locally (not on the cloud), you can use the Orin, or could add a ‘hat’ to the Raspberry Pi for faster local processing, but we do not support it. If you are more familiar with the Raspberry Pi 5 and do not need much processing power, the Raspberry Pi is probably the easier way for you to get started.
VoxHead was not designed as a sex toy. We assume no liability for anything anyone does with their VoxHead that may result in injury or embarrassment.
Absolutely. We are a small team and your generous support is very helpful for us to continue with the project. We have not set up a convenient ‘donate’ button, so please contact us if you would like to contribute or become a sponsor in some way. We would be very happy to hear from you!