Stanford University

Stanford University, founded in 1885 in Stanford, California, is not a robot maker; it appears here because two of its labs produced open humanoid research systems that other groups have built on. Neither project sells hardware or reports deployments; both were published at the Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL).

HumanPlus (2024) came from Chelsea Finn's group with Zipeng Fu, Qingqing Zhao, Qi Wu and Gordon Wetzstein. It is a software pipeline rather than a new robot: a customised 33 degree-of-freedom, 180 cm humanoid built on Unitree hardware with Inspire hands, first controlled by shadowing a person seen through a single RGB camera, then trained by behaviour cloning on the resulting demonstrations. The low-level policy was pretrained on 40 hours of existing human motion data. The team reported 60 to 100 percent success on tasks such as putting on a shoe, unloading a rack, folding a sweatshirt and typing, from up to 40 demonstrations each. It was a CoRL 2024 best paper finalist.

ToddlerBot (2025) is a small open-source humanoid from Haochen Shi and Weizhuo Wang, advised by Shuran Song and C. Karen Liu. It has 30 active degrees of freedom, walks at 0.25 m/s, lifts about 40 percent of its own weight and does cartwheels and pull-ups. Assembly manuals, a bill of materials and a version 2.0 are public so other labs can build one.