Humanoid Factors: Design Principles for AI Humanoids in Human Worlds
For researchers and designers of humanoid robots, this paper provides a conceptual framework to address the gap between technical performance and human-centered interaction needs.
The paper introduces 'humanoid factors' as a framework with four pillars (physical, cognitive, social, ethical) to guide the design of AI-powered humanoid robots for coexistence with humans, and demonstrates its utility by evaluating a real-world control algorithm, showing that conventional metrics overlook human interaction principles.
Human factors research has long focused on optimizing environments, tools, and systems to account for human performance. Yet, as humanoid robots begin to share our workplaces, homes, and public spaces, the design challenge expands. We must now consider not only factors for humans but also factors for humanoids, since both will coexist and interact within the same environments. Unlike conventional machines, humanoids introduce expectations of human-like behavior, communication, and social presence, which reshape usability, trust, and safety considerations. In this article, we introduce the concept of humanoid factors as a framework structured around four pillars - physical, cognitive, social, and ethical - that shape the development of humanoids to help them effectively coexist and collaborate with humans. This framework characterizes the overlap and divergence between human capabilities and those of general-purpose humanoids powered by AI foundation models. To demonstrate our framework's practical utility, we then apply the framework to evaluate a real-world humanoid control algorithm, illustrating how conventional task completion metrics in robotics overlook key human cognitive and interaction principles. We thus position humanoid factors as a foundational framework for designing, evaluating, and governing sustained human-humanoid coexistence.