HMND 01 Alpha

HMND 01 Alpha is the first prototype platform from Humanoid, a London-based robotics startup founded in 2024 by Artem Sokolov. The robot is offered in two configurations: a wheeled mobile manipulator with an omnidirectional base, and a bipedal walking variant that the company first revealed several months later. Both share the same upper-body architecture — 29 active degrees of freedom (excluding end-effectors), a sensor-rich head with 360-degree RGB cameras and dual depth sensors, and either a 12-DoF five-fingered hand or a single-DoF parallel gripper depending on task.

The Wheeled variant has the more substantial deployment story so far. In January 2026, Humanoid and Siemens ran a two-week proof-of-concept at Siemens' electronics factory in Erlangen, Germany, with the robot handling autonomous tote-destacking on real production lines. The trial, announced publicly at Hannover Messe in April 2026, recorded a throughput of 60 tote moves per hour, a pick-and-place success rate above 90%, more than 30 minutes of unbroken autonomous operation, and uptime exceeding 8 hours per shift — one of the more concrete public benchmarks for a humanoid robot in a real industrial setting.

The robot is built on NVIDIA's physical AI stack: NVIDIA Jetson Thor for edge compute, Isaac Sim for simulation, and Isaac Lab for reinforcement-learning policy training. Humanoid layers its own AI framework, KinetIQ, on top, handling end-to-end reasoning for motion and task execution. The HMND 01 Alpha is explicitly a development platform rather than a production product. Production-intent "Beta" hardware is scheduled for Q3 2026, with the Alpha trial intended to surface which capabilities are market-ready, which need refinement, and which are missing entirely.