IHMC Unveils Research Humanoid Alex With 29 Degrees of Freedom, Two-Hour Runtime

IHMC (Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition) has unveiled Alex, a research humanoid, humanoid.guide reported on September 29, 2026. Alex stands 175 centimeters tall, weighs 85 kilograms and has 29 degrees of freedom. Its stated top speed is 3 kph, and its operating time on a single charge is two hours.

What IHMC has presented is a research humanoid that integrates mobility, vision, teleoperation, grasping and whole-body control. It is intended for supervised research in hazardous environments, so it is not aimed at general users, but it offers a concrete framework for real-world testing.

Alex’s novelty lies in bringing together functions for a research robot in a single machine. The fully electric robot combines a 175-centimeter, 85-kilogram body and 29 degrees of freedom with stereo vision, wireless teleoperation, five-finger hands and whole-body control software, making it more than a mobile platform or a simple manipulator. Its stated top speed of 3 kph and two-hour runtime also suggest a design that prioritizes supervised field testing over the appearance of a public demonstration. Related stories in this newspaper, including Sharpa unveils D01, W02 and AE01 at IROS, showing integration of tactile sensing and manipulation data and Sharpa Robotics unveils D01, reported on the form and individual functions of unveiled robots. The reporting on Alex adds a research-oriented control platform, teleoperation, obstacle avoidance and object sorting. The focus, then, is not just on a robot’s appearance or mobility, but on how perception, manipulation and whole-body control are connected. For the industry, an important implication is that the criteria for evaluating humanoids are shifting from whether they can walk to what they can do, and how much, under supervision. Alex is intended for research in hazardous environments and comes with a public SDK, suggesting a configuration that makes it easier for outside researchers to test control and behavior. However, the reports do not specify the scale of its training data, grasping accuracy, the success criteria for obstacle avoidance, the objects used for sorting or its actual uptime. Reproducibility as a research robot, safety and the extent to which tasks can be standardized are the next points to watch.

In Japanese humanoid research, the design of testing environments that include whole-body control software, teleoperation and an SDK for researchers—not just legged locomotion or grasping—is likely to become an issue. In particular, evaluations of robots intended for hazardous environments are likely to focus more on how perception, control and development platforms are integrated than on the hardware alone.