Massachusetts Institute of Technology

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, chartered in 1861 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has produced two humanoids of note, both research machines that never left the campus. The first was Cog, started in 1993 in the AI Lab's Humanoid Robotics Group under Rodney Brooks and Lynn Andrea Stein. Cog was an upper body on a fixed base with moving trunk, head and arms, built on the argument that human-level intelligence must be learned through a body interacting with people. Development stopped by 2003; Marvin Minsky said the money would have been better spent on software. Cog is now in the MIT Museum.

The second is the MIT Humanoid from the Biomimetic Robotics Lab, which Sangbae Kim ran from 2009 to 2025 and which is best known for the Cheetah quadrupeds and their proprioceptive actuators. A 2021 paper by Chignoli, Kim, Stanger-Jones and Kim laid out the design, two new actuators and a model-predictive controller, with back flips and spinning jumps shown in simulation. Later work added self-collision avoidance with control barrier functions and, in 2025 and 2026, reinforcement learning blended with GPU-parallel MPC and reactive grasping.

Kim is on leave at Meta as a robotics architect on its humanoid effort. MIT sells no robots; its contribution is people and methods.