While child-sized humanoid robots like the Unitree R1 have come down in price, not everybody has a spare $6,000 to throw around to play with robots, and smaller models like the Tonybot are more affordable for educational purposes.
The Tonybot offers 17 degrees of freedom, relies on high-voltage bus servos and anti-blockage servos, and has a separate ESP32 expansion board for extra modules. Optionally equipped with an ESP32-S3 AI vision camera and an AI voice integration module, the 38cm tall humanoid robot supports object and face recognition, color and line following tracking, human-robot interaction, fall recovery, obstacle avoidance, and more, besides walking, dancing, etc…
Tonybot specifications:
- H5S Robot Controller
- Storage – MicroSD card socket
- 6x servo ports, head module port
- Bluetooth/MP3 module header
- Sensor – Accelerometer
- Debugging – 4-pin UART header
- Misc
- ON/OFF switch
- Buzzer
- Power Supply
- Via DC jack
- Terminal block for battery
- ESP32 Expansion Board
- ESP32-DevKitC board
- PWM servo port
- Sensor – IMU
- Expansion – I2C, UART, ADC, and 3x GPIO ports; for instance, for the WonderEcho speaker and microphone board.
- Misc – IR receiver, Buzzer
- Camera – Optional ESP32-S3 vison module
- Servos
- LX-824HV high-voltage bus servo: 0.20s/60° rotation speed, 17kg.cm torque @ 11.1V
- LFD-01M anti-blocking servos: 0.12s/60° rotation speed, 1.8kg.cm torque @ 6V
- Degrees of Freedom – 17 DOF
- Detection distance – 2cm to 400cm
- Battery – 11.1V 2,000mAh 10C lithium battery
- Dimensions – 379 x 187 x 121mm
- Weight – About 1.8kg
- Body material – Hard aluminum alloy
The Tonybot can be controlled with the Wondebot app for Android or iOS, or the Bus Servo Control Windows program. But if you want more control of the behavior of the robot, you can program it with Scratch visual programming IDE, Python, or the Arduino IDE.
You’ll find all resources, including tutorials to use the mobile and PC apps and program the robot, as well as firmware, software, and tools, on the documentation page (which currently only points to a Google Drive link). What I found lacking is the hardware documentation for the robot.
The Tonybot (2025) appears to be an iteration of other educational humanoid robots from HiWonder, such as the H5S, and we also wrote about the Raspberry Pi-based PiMecha humanoid robot in 2018. Recent advances in AI make the robot more useful and playful thanks to support for LLMs and AI-enhanced audio and computer vision models.
HiWonder sells the Tonybot for $459.99 and up on its online store. The standard kit includes the robot, a 12.6V/2A power adapter, a 1m USB-C cable, a screw driver, and a user manual. But most people may want to spend more ($529.99) for the advanced kit, which adds an ESP32-S3 AI vision module attached to the head of the robot, the WonderEcho voice interaction module, a touch sensor, a dot matrix module, a temperature and humidity module, color balls, and other accessories. Alternatively, you’ll also find it on AliExpress for $523.69 and up.
Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.
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