Clone Robotics' Protoclone has a skeleton and 1,000 artificial muscles

A robot with a full synthetic skeleton and 1,000 artificial muscles hangs from a rig and twitches like something waking up.

How Protoclone is built

Clone Robotics’ Protoclone is built on a human-shaped skeleton driven by 1,000 Myofiber artificial muscles and 500 sensors, with over 200 degrees of freedom. Instead of motors at the joints, the muscles pull on bone attachment points the way biological muscles do.

The current version runs on pneumatics. The company says future units will move to hydraulics. The latest hardware shown is Torso 3, revealed in March 2026.

Why it looks like nothing else

Every other humanoid on the market is a set of motors in a metal frame, and that is why they move the way they do: smooth, stiff and symmetric. Protoclone moves the way a body moves because it is actuated the way a body is actuated, with many small pulls on a passive skeleton rather than a torque at each joint.

That is also why the footage reads as unsettling. The robot is suspended from a rig, and its twitches and shifts look involuntary rather than programmed, because a muscle-driven system settles into poses instead of snapping to them.

The bet behind the design

Clone is wagering that copying biology, muscle by muscle, reaches human-level dexterity faster than any gearbox. The open question is control: a thousand actuators on a passive skeleton is a much harder system to coordinate than a few dozen motors, and the move from pneumatics to hydraulics is where the company says the strength and precision will come from.