The printed body.
A humanoid you can print — the frame, the transmission, the actuators, the skin — is governed by one honest question: what can additive manufacturing actually do, joint by joint, and where does it hit a wall. The lab's answer is that nine of the ten subsystems inside an electric actuator already have a demonstrated additive route — structure, compliant transmission, flexure bearings, soft-magnetic iron, copper windings, bonded magnets, sensing — and the tenth, the drive die, is the one part that must be fabbed, not printed. So the robot is not a printed shell with bought muscles: every joint is one axial-flux actuator, AXF-1, re-sliced per joint from a single design — same poles, coils, magnets, and process, only the diameter changes. The cost of full printability is legible rather than hidden: bonded-magnet torque runs about half of sintered, so a lean 14-DoF walker carries roughly ten kilograms of actuators, and the sovereignty tax for printing the legs instead of buying them works out to about +38% of actuator mass in the design study. Every joint is priced in joules on the MathGround substrate, and every number traces to one cheap coupon — the remanence of a printed magnet. The research effort is the Free Humanoid Corpus, released CC0 as prior art.
Browse the Free Humanoid Corpus →on GitHub ↗The body prints from the feet up; each joint is an axial-flux actuator with a printed body and one fabbed drive die at its core. The corpus is the CC0 chain: capability matrix → actuator family → magnet gate.
In the field · open printable humanoids are real — Berkeley Humanoid Lite and ToddlerBot both print the body and buy the actuators, and MADE3D prints whole electric machines — for wind turbines. The open, under-explored axis: a printed actuator at humanoid load, integrated and accounted in joules per joint.
↓ Whitepaper · PDFRead online◆ Living paperTechnical Report TR-2026-15 · Institute for Physical AI @ BMI