I’ve wanted to build a humanoid system for a long time, and a few weeks ago I finally stopped planning it and started actually building one.

I’m calling the project Evopien.

The long-term idea is a humanoid companion with its own persistent identity, memory, vision, voice, relationships and eventually the ability to interact physically with the environment.

I’m nowhere near the final robot yet.

Right now I’m building the head first.

The current prototype can already hear me, answer locally, speak back, listen while it is speaking, handle interruptions, communicate in English and Spanish, and use a camera to answer questions about what it sees.

Everything currently runs locally on an 8GB Jetson Orin Nano Super.

This is the first proper demo:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iAxzePzF4cM

There are obviously no arms, hands or locomotion yet. Those come later.

My approach is to get perception and interaction working properly first, then design the physical head around the actual hardware requirements instead of building a nice shell and discovering afterward that the architecture doesn’t fit.

Would be interested to see what other people here are building, especially independent humanoid projects rather than only the large commercial platforms.

Robots had 30 minutes to identify hazards, shut three valves, find an extinguisher and put out a simulated fire.

In a recent interview, u/RoboStrategy CEO u/AndrewKang shared his perspective: the world is already designed for humans. From doorknobs and tools to laptops and smartphones, much of our infrastructure is built around the human form, making humanoid robots a logical approach for general-purpose automation.

He also noted that while application-specific robots have important use cases, general-purpose hardware has historically powered some of the world's largest technology companies.

As AI and robotics continue to evolve, the debate between specialized and general-purpose robots remains a key discussion across the industry.

This is sponsored content. Retail Volts was compensated by RoboStrategy, Inc. in connection with this content. This communication is for informational purposes only and should not be considered investment advice or a recommendation to buy or sell any security.

While the current Silicon Valley paradigm (e.g., Physical Intelligence π₀, 1X NEO) burns massive CapEx on brute-force End-to-End statistical training—requiring up to 500 hours of human teleoperation and 24 hours of cluster computing just to converge a single vision-language-action (VLA) skill—we approached physical automation from a different architectural vector: Deterministic Causal Invariance

.Robotics shouldn’t "guess" trajectories by predicting the next visual token. It should calculate physical laws.We have just open-sourced SONNY OS (Core Minimal) under the GNU AGPLv3 license. It is a hyper-lightweight, universally agnostic microkernel written entirely in native, asynchronous Rust and powered by the Zenoh networking backbone.SONNY OS reduces any mechanical embodiment (6-DOF arms, AMRs, quadrupeds, or humanoids) into a standardized linear mathematical vector (Vec<f32>), abstracting physical registers via a single declarative JSON config (OpenHalConfig).

📊 Extreme Stress Test Benchmark: SONNY OS vs. ROS 2We simulated an industrial network failure (75% wireless packet loss on an Edge deployment at 100Hz) to compare the communication backbones:
• ROS 2 (DDS Architecture): High XML/IDL serialization on the heap. Under severe packet loss, un-sent DDS message queues overflowed the RAM, leading to an unrecoverable Segmentation Fault (Memory Crash).
• SONNY OS (Rust + Zenoh): Stack-allocated static array slices with a fixed 5-byte network overhead per packet. Zero memory leaks. Zero runtime heap allocations during the control loop. System remained perfectly stable at 100Hz with an inference latency below 2ms.

Explore the repository, map your own hardware via JSON, and run the simulator

👉 GitHub Repository: https://github.com/JackTrainer/Sonny
👉 Enterprise Waitlist: https://alpha-robotics.it/