Original title: BRIDGE: An Open-Source Humanoid Platform via Morphology-Control Co-Design for Physical AI
Jianren Wang, Letian Qian, Zikai Wang, Weiwei Wu +3 · September 2026
HumanoidA robot designed to resemble and move like a human. robots need to move like people to learn from human behavior, but engineers usually design the robot's body and its motion software separately. This split creates clunky robots that lack human-like agility and fluid motion. To fix this, researchers created a system that designs the robot's physical shape and its movement controls together. They also built a new scoring tool that measures how well a robot shape matches human joint movements and tracks motion. When tested against three other humanoid models, their co-designed system achieved top results. The team used this method to build Bridge, an open-source humanoid robot that is 88cm-tall. Bridge walks, keeps its balance, and pulls off fast, dynamic moves with high fidelity to human motion.
Imagine baking a cake where the recipe and the oven settings are chosen separately. The cake might not rise properly because the oven doesn't match what the batter needs. In this paper, it's like designing both the cake batter and the oven at the same time so that they work perfectly together, resulting in a better cake every time.
Humanoid robots often move stiffly because their body and software are designed separately. This work aims to create robots that move with human fluidity, which is crucial for real-world applications like assistance.
The abstract does not discuss specific limitations; it focuses on performance in locomotion, balance, and dynamic maneuvers but does not address other capabilities like manipulation or long-term deployment.
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BRIDGE: An Open-Source Humanoid Platform via Morphology-Control Co-Design for Physical AI — Jianren Wang, Letian Qian, Zikai Wang et al.
Abstract licence: CC0
Explanation generated by Synthesis from the abstract — it is not the original paper. This is a preprint, so it hasn't necessarily been peer reviewed.