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The Florida Institute for Human & Machine Cognition
About
IHMC Robotics is the robotics arm of The Florida Institute for Human & Machine Cognition, a United States research institute whose stated purpose is enhancing the human condition through robotics. Its humanoid programme centres on full-scale humanoid platforms built for dynamic movement, and rests on years of in-house engineering in novel mechanisms, torque-dense actuation and lightweight materials, paired with its own whole-body control software. The institute has built humanoids for more than two decades. Its two published humanoid platforms are Nadia and Alex. Nadia is a hybrid hydraulic-electric biped built with Boardwalk Robotics and other partners, named after the gymnast Nadia Comaneci: Moog hydraulic Integrated Smart Actuators drive the legs and spine while electric motors drive the hip and spine yaw joints and the arms, the shell is carbon fibre composite, planetary drives serve hip and spine yaw motion and cycloidal drives serve the arms, and it was designed for indoor and urban spaces full of stairs, ladders and debris, with firefighting, disaster response and bomb disposal as target tasks. Alex is the newer platform and builds on Nadia's lessons: it is fully electric, with custom high-power quasi-direct-drive actuators built around cycloidal transmissions, and it carries its own computation, perception and power so that it can work outdoors without a tether, which is what lets it go where Nadia could not. Alex development is funded through several sources including the Office of Naval Research, the Army Research Laboratory and the Army Data Analysis Center, and Nadia was backed by the US Navy, the Army, NASA and other agencies. The institute's wider robotics work spans exoskeletons, autonomous humanoid behaviours, actuators, electronics and open-source software, and its past projects include the DARPA Robotics Challenge, FastRunner, the Cybathlon 2016 and 2020 entries, the M2V2 exoskeleton and the NASA X1 and Mina exoskeletons. IHMC publishes its whole-body control software and offers an open Alex SDK, and it sells or licenses hardware through inquiry, listing Alex as available on inquiry and Nadia at a stated 700,000 US dollars. IHMC is a not-for-profit research institute of the Florida University System, created at the University of West Florida, with a main campus in historic downtown Pensacola that opened in 1999 as part of the city's urban core revitalisation and a branch campus in Ocala that opened in 2010 near three major university research partners. The Pensacola campus houses teams working on artificial intelligence, machine learning, human-centred computing, robotics, exoskeletons, cybersecurity and drones, and is also home to the National Center for Collaborative Autonomy; in 2024 the institute added a three-storey 40,000-square-foot biomedical research centre, the Healthspan, Resilience and Performance Research Complex. It also runs a joint Ph.D. programme in intelligent systems and robotics with the University of West Florida, and its software work includes CmapTools. Its registered contact is 40 S Alcaniz Street, Pensacola, Florida 32502, telephone (850) 202-4480, with the downtown campus also reachable on 15 SE Osceola Avenue and a general line on 850-202-4400. Leadership has included Morley Stone as chief executive, with chief science officer Tim Broderick announced as his successor, and the Alex humanoid programme is led by senior research scientist Dr. Robert Griffin. Alex was unveiled on 19 November 2025 as a multi-year, multimillion-dollar project funded through the Office of Naval Research; the official release says its high-power custom actuators cut weight sharply against Nadia's roughly 100 kg, with Alex estimated at 85 kg including a battery.
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