Caltech roboticist says safety should be top concern with humanoid robots

Humanoids, these two-legged robots that look like smooth, often faceless versions of us, have become a center of attention within robotics, both in terms of funding and hype. We are now in a situation where humanoid demonstrations are being driven solely by performance and making the latest "cool" video, Ames says, and companies are rushing to scale and deploy. Home

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Feature Story | 30-Sep-2026

Caltech roboticist says safety should be top concern with humanoid robots, a mathematical tool that guarantees the safety of robotic systems. His group is now applying CBFs to humanoid robots and experimenting with improvements. Here, he is shown throwing a dodgeball at a humanoid running a CBF-based safety layer that will help it avoid the ball.view more

Credit: AMBER Lab/Caltech One of those papers, presented at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, demonstrated that CBF combined with newer AI tools such as reinforcement learning—a type of machine learning that rewards robots for behaving in desired ways—allowed a humanoid to successfully avoid collisions with its environment. These ideas were recently extended to help a humanoid dodge a ball thrown at it. This "dodgeball" behavior can also be used to help robots move out of the way of moving obstacles or people. In one set of videos documenting such tests, a humanoid walks up to a person and then stops and reverses course when it comes too close.