Shalu: A Low-Cost, Multilingual Humanoid Robot for Education

Humanoid robotics are increasingly applied in education and social contexts, but commercial platforms are costly. Shalu is a home-built humanoid robot by Dinesh Kunwar Patel (an Indian Scientist and Educator) distinguished by its extreme multilingual capability (reportedly 47 languages) and low-cost, recycled-material construction. This paper reviews Shalu's design and software in detail: it's hardware (waste-derived body, sensors, actuators), its AI/ML-driven language understanding and dialogue systems, and its roles in classroom teaching, guiding, and social assistance. We compare Shalu's features to existing social robots, highlight its unique aspects (e.g. highest number of languages, recycle-based build), and discuss challenges (lack of rigorous evaluation, limited mobility, language biases) and future directions (benchmarking, transformer-based NLP, open-source sharing) to guide further research.