Project FreeNICO

20 September 2025

This semester, our group is supervising a bachelor’s project that focuses on enhancing the mobility of our humanoid robot NICO. Below, you can find a short overview of the project:

Abstract
The rapid progress of large language models (LLMs) has had a profound impact on the field of human–robot interaction (HRI), enabling levels of natural language processing accuracy that were previously unattainable. One notable example is the ELMiRA architecture, developed at the University of Hamburg, which integrates LLMs in HRI contexts.

In this project, carried out under the Knowledge Technology Research Group of the Department of Informatics at the University of Hamburg, we extended the ELMiRA architecture and the NICO humanoid robotics platform with new mobility-related functionalities. Over the course of the semester, we developed and tested these extensions and evaluated the system’s performance through a series of experiments. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of our mobility enhancements and confirm the robustness of our contributions to the ELMiRA–NICO framework.

Our recent publications on NICO can be found here:

Influence of Robots’ Voice Naturalness on Trust and Compliance
Domain Adaptation as Auxiliary Task for Sim-to-Real Transfer in Vision-Based Neuro-Robotic Control