Charlie

Charlie is a hominid research robot from the DFKI Robotics Innovation Center in Germany. Around 0.75 metres tall and 18 kg, it was built to study advanced mobility, featuring an active spine that lets it move on four legs and shift toward bipedal walking for versatile, biologically inspired locomotion.

The DFKI Charlie is densely instrumented: its joints report absolute and relative position, speed, current, supply voltage and temperature, while each foot carries 49 pressure sensors, a three-axis accelerometer and a distance sensor for rich ground-contact feedback. Actuation comes from eight 48V RoboDrive motors with 1:50 harmonic drives, eight more with 1:80 gears, and several BLDC Faulhaber motors. Its closed-source Linux control software, written in C, C++ and VHDL, handles real-time control, sensor fusion and machine-learning-based approaches, with roughly 60 minutes of runtime.

DFKI applies Charlie to education, research and space exploration, where its active spine and sensor-rich feet make it a testbed for adaptive locomotion and planetary-mobility studies. Its research pedigree makes this research robot valuable to advanced labs investigating spine-assisted gaits, terrain adaptation and the transition between quadrupedal and bipedal walking.

Nexon System supports Charlie-class platforms across Southeast Asia, providing commissioning, control and task programming support, sensor integration, and researcher training with ongoing support. We help research and teaching teams get the control system running, integrate additional sensing and turn experimental setups into repeatable demonstrations. Talk to Nexon to plan a Charlie research deployment.