Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition

The Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition was founded in 1990 by Kenneth Ford, Alberto Canas and Bruce Dunn on the University of West Florida campus in Pensacola and became an independent not-for-profit institute of the State University System of Florida by legislation in 2004. It has a second site in Ocala and, per Wikipedia, over 120 researchers and staff. Money comes from DARPA, NASA, the Office of Naval Research, NIH, NSF and corporate sponsors.

Its robotics group, now led by Robert Griffin, made its name writing walking and balance controllers for other people's humanoids. It came first in the DARPA Virtual Robotics Challenge in 2013 and second in the 2015 DARPA Robotics Challenge finals on a Boston Dynamics Atlas, and worked with NASA on the Valkyrie humanoid.

Nadia, a roughly 100 kg humanoid designed with Boardwalk Robotics for stairs, ladders and debris in urban and disaster settings, was its first in-house full humanoid, with progress videos from 2022 and an industry research award in 2025. It was retired in autumn 2025 in favour of Alex, an ONR-funded successor at about 85 kg with custom high-power actuators, unveiled on 19 November 2025 with the stated aim of leaving the lab and reaching human-level speeds. These are research platforms with no commercial sales.