2024
The story of Mona
The founder shares about the background, the making, and the concepts.
Mona – the Kind Humanoid
Mona was the first LLM powered humanoid. It was created by Christoph Kohstall and the company that grew around Mona was Kind Humanoid. Kind Humanoid was acquired by 1X in Jan 2025.
Timeline
Key milestones from balancing to acquisition.
01 / 2025
Kind Humanoid acquired by 1X
"The relationship between the two newly joined companies is built on the foundational belief that humanoids need to be developed alongside humans — living and learning among us."
11 / 2024
Yves Béhar and Christoph Kohstall at TED AI
"We need technologists that really apply tech and AI in a humanistic ways." Yves Béhar
09 / 2023
Mona takes its first steps
"I saw in a newsetter that there will be a conference on walking robots in Brazil - I really wanted to go - 6 days (and nights) later Mona took her first steps."
04 / 2023
Kind Humanoid gets funded
12 / 2022
LLM and vision based actions in the real world
Just 13 days after the release of ChatGPT, Mona became the first humanoid embodied LLM. See at 1:21 what happens when I tell Mona "I'm thirsty".
06 / 2022
Mona balances
Specification
| Parameter | Value | Units | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
|
Physical
|
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| Height | 183 | cm | Same as creator 🙂 |
| Weight | 29 | kg | Total with battery |
| Weight (normalized) | 23 | kg | Normalized to 165 cm |
|
Degrees of Freedom
|
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| Arm + clavicle | 9×2 | DOF | Per arm |
| Torso | 3 | DOF | |
| Leg + toe | 8×2 | DOF | Per leg |
| Eyes gimbal | 4 | DOF | |
| Hand | 6 | DOF | left hand only |
| Total DOF | 47 | DOF | |
|
Brain & Compute
|
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| Brain – Intelligence | GPT 3.5 | Language model | |
| Brain – Kinematics | Neural network based | Motion / control representation | |
| Compute | Nvidia Orin AGX | Main compute | |
|
Power & Energy
|
|||
| Total motor power | 47 | kW | Peak |
| Battery capacity | 1000 | Wh | |
|
Run time
|
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| Standby | 24 | hours | |
| Standing | 8 | hours | |
| Walking | 5 | hours | |
| Working | 3–7 | hours | Depending on task |
|
Sensors
|
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| Microphones | Stereo | ||
| Speaker | Mono | ||
| Cameras | 7 | ||
| Torque sensing | Direct joint torques | ||
| Feet sensing | 4-point force sensing | ||
|
Performance
|
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| Joint strength | 60th percentile male | ||
| Joint speed | 60th percentile male | ||
|
Build & Cost
|
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| BOM @ 1 unit | 10 000 | $ | Bill of materials at one unit |
| Robots built | 1 | ||
| Dev & build time | 3 years, 1 engineer | ||
| Heat management | Water cooled | ||
Press
Applications
Where Mona wants to assist.
Applications
Principle: doing the things humans should do but don’t do
Additional labor to:
- accelerate the transition to renewable energies
- provide better and more accessible care
- build a circular economy
Showcase
Medical care
"Imagine a robot going beyond mundane tasks and assisting humans in ways never possible before"
Gallery
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