Humanoid says KinetIQ Ascend reinforcement learning approaches human-level dexterity - The Robot Report

Humanoid is building humanoid robots with the goal of becoming the No. 1 general-purpose industrial humanoid robotics company within two years. Founded by Artem Sokolov in 2024, it has more than 250 engineers, researchers, and innovators from top global tech companies.

With offices in London, Boston, Vancouver, and San Diego, Humanoid said it is building commercially viable, scalable, and safe systems for real-world applications. In May, the company partnered with Bosch and Schaeffler to scale production of its HMND robots.

KinetIQ Ascend supports ‘capability factory’ The Robot Report

Humanoid says KinetIQ Ascend reinforcement learning approaches human-level dexterity

By The Robot Report Staff |

Arm drift after long reinforcement training caused by action prefix drift. Source: Humanoid

Robotic manipulation is making progress with artificial intelligence. London-based Humanoid last week introduced KinetIQ Ascend, its reinforcement learning, or RL, approach designed to reach 99.9% manipulation reliability at human speed and beyond.

“The humanoid race is becoming a question of scale, and real-world RL can be a core part of the answer,” stated Jarad Cannon, chief technology officer at Humanoid. “Robots that once required months of manual tuning are now outperforming human demonstrations within days.” Humanoid said the results demonstrated that KinetIQ Ascend shows a new way of developing robot capabilities, proving effective across a range of real-world operational tasks, from high-speed single-arm picking to complex bimanual handling.

KinetIQ Ascend also demonstrated that robot performance improves predictably as training time increases. It’s similar to how large language models (LLMs) improve as more compute and data become available. The company said that the observed scaling trend, supported by simulation experiments, suggests that its method scales all the way to 100% reliability.