Berkeley Humanoid
Berkeley Humanoid is a mid sized, low cost bipedal research robot from UC Berkeley's Hybrid Robotics Lab, presented in a July 2024 paper as a reliable platform for learning based control. It was designed to be built and repaired by a small team and to survive many falls. It led to the fully open source Berkeley Humanoid Lite in 2025.
We have not sat down with this one. The score below is computed from the data we hold, and the facts on this page are sourced. It is not on sale, so there is nothing to recommend.
How the score is built
Capability is what the machine physically does. Value compares it with others at a similar price, not with the whole market. Buyability asks whether you can really order one. Ecosystem is the software and community around it. Proof is what it has done in the field, which is where most humanoids score badly and should.
What people buy instead.
- Status
- Research
- Category
- research
- First revealed
- July 2024
- Form
- bipedal
- Height
- 85 cm
- Weight
- 16 kg
- Payload
- n/a
- Degrees of freedom
- 12
- Battery
- n/a
- Runtime
- n/a
- Walking speed
- n/a
- Actuation
- electric, custom quasi direct drive actuators
- Units deployed (est.)
- not disclosed
- Teleoperation
- no
Where it stands
Research platform of the Hybrid Robotics Lab; not for sale, succeeded by the open source Berkeley Humanoid Lite.
What stands out
- Designed for reinforcement learning research
- Low cost quasi direct drive actuators
- Withstands repeated falls
Autonomy, observed
Paper and videos show learned walking on varied terrain and robustness to pushes, tested in the lab and outdoors on campus
Hands, sensors, brain
- Hands: none in the base version
- Sensors: IMU, joint encoders
- Compute: onboard computer running learned policies
- AI stack: reinforcement learning policies trained in simulation
Price and volume
reported build cost under 10,000 dollars per unit
How a humanoid robot works: actuators, compute, sensors and the model
Of 182 humanoids on record, 178 say what moves the joints and 43 say what computer is inside. The further a layer sits from the metal, the less the maker tells you about it.
Open-source humanoids: what you can actually build
24 of the 182 humanoids on record call themselves open source. 15 publish hardware files and software, 3 name a licence, 12 can be ordered, and none of the four on preorder has any autonomy evidence yet.
Other robots by University of California, Berkeley.
Sources
- 01
- 02Berkeley HumanoidUC Berkeley
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