EngineAI SA01

SA01 is the odd one out in EngineAI's line-up: it is not a humanoid but a pair of legs. The company describes it as a highly extensible general-purpose bipedal robot, which in practice means a walking chassis with a mounting deck on top, sold to universities and research groups that want to study locomotion without paying for arms, hands and a head they will never use. The manufacturer's card gives 12 degrees of freedom, six per leg, with 400 mm thigh and shin segments, an aluminium alloy structure and a mass of about 40 kg. Hip and knee joints peak at 160 N.m, walking speed is around 1 m/s and the stated load capacity is roughly 10 to 15 kg - enough to carry a torso, an arm or a sensor rig belonging to the customer. Balance rests on a high-precision IMU and two absolute magnetic encoders per joint, so the controller always knows where each limb is without a homing routine at power-up. The 15 Ah, 0.819 kWh lithium pack runs to about two hours and swaps out quickly. What makes SA01 interesting beyond the numbers is that EngineAI publishes both the hardware design and the control algorithms, including the straight-knee gait work that the company's full-size SE01 made famous. For a laboratory, that turns the robot from a black box into something that can be modified and republished.

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