Research topic

The printed body.

A humanoid you can print (the frame, the transmission, the actuators, the skin) is governed by one 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 @ JBI

Binding constraintMaterials

A humanoid whose body and actuators you can print is bounded by one number: torque density in materials a printer can lay down. Every gait and every grasp is a withdrawal against it, which is why the body question comes before the policy question here. Raise that number and the printable envelope opens for everyone at once.

One of eight, and only one of them is physics. How we read a frontier →