SURENA is a humanoid robot which has been developed and fabricated through a joint project between “The R&D Society of Iranian Industry, Mine & Commerce” and “Center for Advanced Vehicles (CAV) at University of Tehran”. The project of “Design, Fabrication and Control of the Humanoid Robot (SURENA)” was first presented on December 15, 2008 as SURENA I. SURENA I was an 8 degree-of-freedom (8 DOF) humanoid robot, which was able to move on a pre-defined trajectory with a tracking and remote control system. SURENA project is enhancing the ability to design robots that walk on two legs, under a feedback control system that provides dynamic balance, yielding a much more human-like motion. The work is addressing both theoretical and experimental aspects of bipedal locomotion.

On July 3, 2010 the second generation of SURENA was unveiled. SURENA II has 22 DOFs including 12, 8, and 2 at its legs, hands and head respectively. Its height is 145 cm with a weight of 45 kg. SURENA is a product of more than 10,000 hours of hard work by a team of 20 engineers and students.

SURENA II is equipped with various sensors such as gyroscope and accelerometers which provide stable motion. A Multi-Input Multi-Output (MIMO) control system is employed to provide a smooth walk. SURENA II is a humanoid robot that balances itself and walks freely. The robot has the shape and size of a standard human, making it the first anthropomorphic robot in Iran that moves dynamically like a real human.

The anthropomorphic nature of SURENA makes it a wonderful robot for motivating very challenging problems in engineering, without having to assume familiarity with advanced mathematics or physics. In this context, the concepts of dynamics, stability, sensing, actuation and feedback control become interesting and understandable to a broad audience. The intrinsic attraction of SURENA has been employed as a forum to demonstrate to students and to the public the excitement of a career in engineering. A major benefit of our approach is that we evaluate the capability of the theory to tolerate model imperfections. This is accomplished through experiments on SURENA. The successful operation of SURENA requires equally innovative feedback control theory that works in concert with the natural dynamics of the system to achieve stability and robustness of the implemented behaviors.

Speech and vision development are on the way in the next generation of SURENA. Presently, SURENA team is working on the development of a more advanced version of SURENA with a faster maneuverability and higher level of machine intelligence suitable for various industrial, medical and household applications.