This paper presents the mechanical design of a human-ridable giant humanoid robot that enables intuitive pilot-in-the-loop whole-body control. Despite the steady development of humanoid robots, humanoids continue to be constrained by human-scale strength and size, with poor scalability of transmissions and structures at large sizes, and teleoperation limits in latency and situational awareness. To overcome such limitations, we introduce the mechanical design of a human-ridable giant humanoid with a cockpit-style human-machine-interface (HMI): an Internal Robot (IR) with gravity-compensated zero-torque joint stream angles to the External Robot (ER) arms, while the ER lower body provides bipedal stabilization and locomotion. This approach preserves situational awareness, mitigates teleoperation latency and viewpoint issues, and couples human decision making with robotic strength, reach, and endurance. We define the objectives for rideability, biped operation in human environments, and protective, high-tech packaging realized via seated posture, nonwearable manipulator HMI, height-first co-design, rapid low-cost fabrication, and vertical integration. In addition, we detail the subsystem design and demonstrated stable walking and whole-body tasks.
Park et al. (Fri,) studied this question.