Westwood Robotics — bipedal humanoid robots and BEAR actuators from UCLA RoMeLa

• 2018
  Founded
• Los Angeles, CA
  Headquarters
• THEMIS V2
  Latest flagship (2024)
• Undisclosed
  Funding raised
• USA
  Country
• Private
  Status

About Westwood Robotics

Westwood Robotics Corporation was founded in 2018 in Los Angeles, California by Xiaoguang Zhang and a team of roboticists from the UCLA Robotics & Mechanisms Laboratory (RoMeLa), the influential humanoid and legged-robotics lab led by Professor Dennis Hong. RoMeLa is the same lab behind landmark U.S. humanoid programs including DARwIn-OP — for years the reference open-platform humanoid used in RoboCup — and ARTEMIS, the first American-built adult-size humanoid capable of dynamic, bipedal walking on unstructured outdoor terrain. Westwood was created to translate that decades-long body of academic research into commercial hardware: proprioceptive actuators, complete bipedal robots, and platforms other robotics teams could actually buy.

The company's initial focus was on BEAR (Back-drivable Electromechanical Actuator for Robotics) — a family of high-torque, back-drivable, quasi-direct-drive actuators derived from RoMeLa's research on proprioceptive control. BEAR modules combine a brushless DC motor, a low-ratio planetary reduction, and integrated force sensing to give a joint the compliance needed for dynamic locomotion, safe human interaction, and contact-rich manipulation. The actuators are used inside Westwood's own robots and are also sold as standalone modules to research groups building their own bipeds and quadrupeds.

Westwood's product roadmap has since expanded into two complete humanoid platforms. BRUCE (Bipedal Robot Unit with Compliance Enhanced) — a kid-size, 70 cm, 4.8 kg open-platform humanoid released in 2023 in collaboration with RoMeLa — is now used by researchers and educators worldwide as an affordable dynamic-locomotion testbed. THEMIS V2, the company's 2024 flagship, is a full-size, roughly 1.6 m bipedal humanoid with 40+ degrees of freedom, dexterous hands, and up to 200 TOPS of onboard AI compute — positioned as both a best-in-class research platform and an early industrial humanoid capable of light manufacturing, logistics, inspection, and service tasks.

Westwood remains privately held and has not publicly disclosed venture funding to date; its revenue model has been direct hardware sales — THEMIS V2 is listed at approximately $69,890 and BRUCE between $8,890 and $15,290 — rather than the multi-billion-dollar rounds raised by best-funded peers. That posture places Westwood in a distinct competitive slot within the current humanoid robotics and AI boom: unlike Figure, Apptronik, and 1X, which chase mass-manufactured general-purpose humanoids, or Boston Dynamics, which sits inside Hyundai, Westwood competes as a founder-led, research-anchored specialist — a company whose actuators and robots ship into the R&D labs building the rest of the industry.

Technology stack

Westwood's platform is a vertically integrated combination of custom proprioceptive actuation, multi-modal sensing, high-performance onboard compute, and a ROS-based, AI-augmented humanoid operating system. The company has publicly framed its edge as building the actuator, the robot, and the control software as a single system — a thesis inherited directly from RoMeLa's research approach at UCLA.

Perception

THEMIS V2 uses a stereo-vision camera pair for depth perception and situational awareness, supplemented by a high-rate MicroStrain 3DM-CV7-AHRS IMU sampling at over 1,000 Hz and per-joint force sensing derived from the BEAR actuators' back-drivable design. Optional touch sensing at the dexterous hands lets the robot perform contact-rich manipulation — inserting parts, gripping deformable objects, and reacting to unexpected contact — in an unstructured research or light manufacturing environment.

AI, control, and onboard compute

THEMIS V2 runs a ROS-based AI-augmented humanoid operating system with up to 200 TOPS of onboard AI compute driven by an AMD Ryzen 7840HS main controller. The stack integrates large-language-model-based instruction and interaction, real-time whole-body balance, terrain adaptation, and motion planning. Because inference runs on the robot itself, THEMIS does not require cloud connectivity for real-time tasks — an important requirement for lab and factory-floor deployment. BRUCE ships with a lighter compute stack (up to 6 TOPS, 8 GB RAM) but shares the same open-source, MPC-driven control lineage.

Actuators, power, and thermal

Both robots use BEAR proprioceptive electric actuators — no hydraulics — which simplifies serviceability and improves efficiency. Liquid-cooled Koala BEAR variants are used at the highest-load knee joints, giving THEMIS the burst torque needed for running and parkour without thermally throttling. THEMIS V2 uses hot-swappable lithium-ion batteries with runtime published up to three hours of continuous operation, while BRUCE runs about twenty minutes of continuous dynamic operation from a 3,000 mAh pack.

Power management is a particularly demanding subsystem for a humanoid of this class. Each joint's BEAR servo controller must deliver hundreds of watts of instantaneous torque without thermally throttling, which drives the use of high-efficiency wide-bandgap semiconductors (SiC and GaN) in the motor-driver stages and requires tightly matched precision passives on every gate-drive and current-sense channel. The onboard battery pack integrates cell balancing, thermal management, and multi-stage protection ICs — subsystems whose reliability is often the practical ceiling on how long a humanoid platform can run between charges, and whose supporting MLCC capacitors and precision resistors have been particularly hard to source during the current AI boom.

The robotics supply chain — where Hybrid Electronics fits in

A modern humanoid robot is one of the most component-dense products ever built. A single THEMIS-class platform depends on thousands of individual electronic components: precision BLDC motor drivers, high-torque proprioceptive servo modules, IMUs and 6-DoF force-torque sensors, LiDAR and time-of-flight modules, GPU compute boards, battery-management ICs, wide-bandgap SiC/GaN power semiconductors, high-speed board-to-board connectors, precision resistors, and thousands of MLCC capacitors distributed across every power and signal rail.

Building that kind of hardware puts enormous pressure on the electronic-components supply chain. Prototype pilots and low-volume production runs frequently hit allocation, EOL notices, and long lead times on the exact parts they need, and R&D and field-service teams routinely have to support older platforms that use semiconductors no longer in mainstream distribution. During the current humanoid robotics and general-purpose robot AI boom, this pressure is amplified: dozens of well-funded teams are chasing the same short list of high-torque BLDC drivers, precision IMUs, GPU compute modules, and automotive-grade power semiconductors, and franchise stock on many key parts is now measured in months of lead time rather than weeks.

Hybrid Electronics has been sourcing electronic components for industrial and embedded systems since 1995. For robotics teams — humanoid, mobile, industrial, and research — we specialize in finding the parts you need when mainstream distribution can't:

Trademark and affiliation notice. Westwood Robotics®, THEMIS, THEMIS V2, BRUCE, and BEAR are trademarks of Westwood Robotics Corporation. Hybrid Electronics is an independent electronic-components sourcing company and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or authorized by Westwood Robotics Corporation. All information on this page is compiled from public sources for educational and reference purposes.