NASA (Johnson Space Center)

NASA's humanoid work sits in the dexterous robotics team at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, now led by Shaun Azimi. It began in the late 1990s with Robonaut 1, a DARPA-partnered upper-body robot that never flew. In 2007 General Motors signed a Space Act Agreement to co-develop a successor, and Robonaut 2 was unveiled in February 2010.

R2 launched to the International Space Station on STS-133 on 24 February 2011, the first US-built robot on the station. Legs arrived in April 2014, but the robot developed electrical faults and came home in May 2018; it was never relaunched and is now a museum piece. Valkyrie (R5), a 1.87 m, 129 kg biped with 44 degrees of freedom, was built between October 2012 and July 2013 for the DARPA Robotics Challenge, where it scored no points at the December 2013 trials after a network fault. In 2015 NASA lent units to MIT and Northeastern with USD 500,000 each, and in July 2023 sent one to Woodside Energy in Perth under a reimbursable agreement to study remote caretaking of offshore facilities.

NASA has no production humanoid; its lasting output is people and actuator know-how: Valkyrie team member Nick Paine co-founded Apptronik, and former Robonaut lead Nic Radford founded Persona AI.