University of Texas at Austin

The University of Texas at Austin is listed for its Human Centered Robotics Laboratory, founded and led by Luis Sentis, a Stanford electrical engineering PhD who holds the Frank and Kay Reese endowed professorship in aerospace engineering. The lab works on whole-body control, planning and human factors for humanoids, mobile manipulators and exoskeletons, and had graduated 17 PhDs by March 2026.

Its humanoid record has two strands. Sentis was UT Austin's lead in the DARPA Robotics Challenge partnership with NASA Johnson Space Center, helping design and test the Valkyrie humanoid, for which he received a NASA Elite Team award; lab research later let Valkyrie run in a real-world setting. The second strand is the Draco series of teen-sized bipeds. Draco 3 was custom-built for the lab by Apptronik, the Austin humanoid company that grew out of the lab in 2016 with former student Nick Paine as CTO and Sentis as a founding member and innovation adviser; Apptronik announced a large funding round at the New York Stock Exchange in February 2026.

Recent work includes a tendon-driven ARISTO hand with haptic wearables developed with Sony. The lab sells nothing; its robots are research tools, and its main commercial output is the company it spawned.