This Industrial Humanoid Robot Just Hit a Major Milestone This Month

Seven months. That’s all it took for a new humanoid robot to go from idea to live factory work. And this week at CES, it’s already picking parts like a seasoned worker.

UK-based robotics startup Humanoid is showcasing its HMND 01 Alpha robot at CES 2026, marking a major moment for humanoid robots designed for real industrial jobs rather than research labs or demos.

Humanoid says HMND 01 Alpha was built in just seven months, a development timeline that stands out in an industry where humanoid robots often take years to reach working prototypes.

The company credits that speed to its heavy use of Nvidia robotics technologies, including Jetson Thor, Isaac Sim, and Isaac Lab, which allowed engineers to design, test, and train the robot in simulation long before hardware hit the factory floor.

Using digital twins and reinforcement learning, Humanoid was able to test locomotion, manipulation, navigation, and even hardware design virtually, reducing risks before physical deployment.

What HMND 01 Alpha can do

HMND 01 Alpha is a 220-centimeter-tall wheeled humanoid designed for industrial use. It moves at speeds of up to 7.2 km/h and can handle bimanual payloads of up to 15 kilograms, lifting heavier objects when they remain closer to its body.

The robot’s reach extends from floor level to two meters high, with the ability to access shelf depths of up to 60 centimeters. This allows it to work across ground-level bins and elevated storage areas.

Alpha features 29 active degrees of freedom, excluding end-effectors, and uses AI-driven, end-to-end reasoning to plan and execute tasks. Depending on the job, it can be equipped with either a 12-DOF five-fingered hand or a 1-DOF parallel gripper.

For perception, the robot relies on a sensor-rich head with 360-degree RGB cameras and two depth sensors, enabling it to understand cluttered industrial spaces in real time.

Live industrial work at CES

Rather than a controlled lab demo, HMND 01 Alpha is performing a real factory task at the Schaeffler Group booth at CES, according to Interesting Engineering. The robot autonomously picks unsorted metallic bearing rings from cluttered bins and places them onto a buffer table, a task that mirrors real production workflows in industrial plants.

Describing the system, Andreas Zeug of Schaeffler said in an interview with Interesting Engineering, “It’s press one button, and everything is automated from there,” he added. “The robot takes rings from an unsorted bin and feeds them to a buffer table, which in a real factory leads into a ball-bearing assembly line.”

While many humanoid robots focus on walking, HMND 01 Alpha rolls. Schaeffler says that the choice reflects real factory conditions.

“For industrial use, we have completely even floors, so we don’t need legs,” Zeug said. “A wheel-based system is more stable and easier to integrate from a safety perspective.”

Powered by Nvidia at the edge

At the heart of HMND 01 Alpha is NVIDIA Jetson Thor, which serves as the robot’s edge computer. According to Humanoid, this allows the robot to run advanced robotic AI models directly on-device, reducing system complexity and improving reliability.

The company also uses Nvidia AI infrastructure to train Vision-Language-Action models, cutting post-training time down to just hours and enabling new robot behaviors to move from training to deployment within a single day.

To date, Humanoid reports 20,500 pre-orders, signaling early market interest. The company is backed by $50 million in founder-led capital and employs around 200 people, including alumni from Apple, Tesla, Google, Boston Dynamics, Sanctuary AI, and Nvidia.

For another look at humanoid robots moving beyond the lab into everyday life, check out eWeek’s coverage of LG’s CLOiD home robot debut at CES 2026, designed to make housework a thing of the past.

The post This Industrial Humanoid Robot Just Hit a Major Milestone This Month appeared first on eWEEK.