By the end of the spring semester 2027, the 7,500 students navigating the halls of the Mechanical Engineering Building on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus may need to watch out for a new friend: a 4-foot-tall aluminum humanoid robot.
At least, that’s the hope of Wisconsin Humanoid Robotics, a year-old student organization that is working diligently to bring one of the little guys to life. It’s no casual endeavor; over the school year, more than 100 students divided into 17 subteams will meet weekly, tweaking designs, fabricating robot parts and writing code that will animate the automaton. Along the way, the students will work with cutting-edge, real-world technology, get a dose of fast-paced “startup” culture, and gain experience available to very few college students.
The humanoid robotics club is the brainchild of Grant Gao, a sophomore in mechanical engineering. In 2025, before starting his freshman year, he reached out to his friend Max Schneider, a mechanical engineering senior Gao worked with in a competitive robotics club in high school. His idea was to bring their experience building bots to UW-Madison.
Schneider says that at first he was skeptical; the media was full of goofy humanoid robots that seemed to fail at every imaginable task. “For a long time, humanoid robotics was a joke in the engineering and robotics space,” he says. “They have to interact with so many variables in the world; the computation and engineering skill was just never there.”
But as he researched the topic, he realized that advances in AI over the last few years had made the project viable. Building a humanoid bot seemed like a fun, challenging goal they could reasonably achieve. Even more, Gao and Schneider realized that it was a unique opportunity and differentiator for UW-Madison. “We could take what is an incredibly new cutting-edge technology that almost no undergrads are exposed to anywhere else and give ourselves and our classmates that opportunity,” says Schneider.
Gao says the club could give students hands-on experience in a vibrant, emerging field. “There really isn’t a 10-year head start in humanoid robotics yet. The field is moving so quickly that students can start today and, by graduation, have years of experience in a technology that is still being defined,” he says.
Right out of the gate, the Wisconsin Humanoid Robotics club took off. More than 550 people signed up for its mailing list, with more than 200 students attending some of the first in-person meetings in the fall 2025 semester. Over time, team membership has stabilized at around 110 active participants, making it one of the largest engineering-focused student organizations on campus. Most participants come from mechanical engineering, electrical and computer engineering, and computer science—though there are plenty of students from other engineering disciplines. Team members say they welcome motivated participants from across campus as well.
During the 2025-26 academic year, the group developed the mechanical design for its robot, with subteams coming up with plans for legs, arms, balance systems and all the necessary components for a bot.
Over the summer, 15 out of the 17 subteams continued to meet weekly, and the team’s leadership has focused on fund raising and signing up sponsors in anticipation of moving into the fabrication phase of the process during the 2026-27 academic year.
The mechanical teams will mill most of the robot, which is primarily made of aluminum, and 3D print components using the equipment in the college’s Grainger Engineering Design Innovation Lab. The electrical teams are spending extra time to consult with professionals to make sure their work is correct so the bot doesn’t short out or catch fire. And after delving deeply into the theory that guides humanoid robots, the software team is beginning to write the code that will guide its “Sconnie” bot.
If all goes well, the team’s bipedal bot will pad its way down the halls by graduation day in May 2027. If successful, team leaders plan to iterate the bot in coming years to focus on individual tasks, like folding laundry or using tools. If things go really well, they envision entering the Wisconsin Humanoid bot in some of the emerging robot contests, like the IEEE Humanoids competition or World Humanoid Robot Games. “Walking is the milestone, not the end goal,” says Gao. “We’re interested in a future where robots can build, experiment and discover alongside us from construction to labs to manufacturing. The long term is to expand humanity’s ability to do science, build infrastructure and create abundance.”
But that is for future teams to dream about. “If we could just have it walk down the hallway by the end of the year that would be a huge success,” says Schneider. “And really, the fact that it would have been all done in 15 months would be a tremendous accomplishment for the team.”
While the leadership wants to keep the club fun and engaging for participants, Gao thinks the project is more than just an interesting extracurricular. “We’re taking a shot at building what we think will be one of the defining technologies of our generation,” he says. “And there’s no reason students at Wisconsin should have to wait until they graduate to help build it.”
Featured image caption: Members of the Humanoid Robotics Club are beginning to construct a robot the team designed during the 2025-2026 school year. Submitted photo.