Menlo Research

About Menlo Research

Menlo Research is a Singapore-based AI and robotics lab that took the unusual step of giving its humanoid away as a design. Its robot, the Asimov 1, is a 1.2 m, 35 kg bipedal humanoid with 25 actuated degrees of freedom plus two passive toe joints, released as open hardware in April 2026 under CERN-OHL-S-2.0 with GPL-2.0 software — mechanical CAD, wiring, MuJoCo simulation and a pre-trained walking policy all published on GitHub. Builders can either self-source the bill of materials or buy the 'Here Be Dragons' kit from Menlo for $20,000 with a $499 deposit, then spend roughly 100 hours assembling it. The engineering is deliberately reproducible: 7075 aluminium only where loads demand it, Multi Jet Fusion nylon everywhere else so parts can be reprinted, a parallel RSU ankle that shares torque across two motors, and locomotion trained with processor-in-the-loop simulation that injects real CAN-bus latency and sensor noise. Menlo's pitch is education and ecosystem rather than deployment: the robot ships without hands, and a free browser simulator, Digital Asimov, lets developers test policies before buying anything.