UMA Northstar

Northstar is UMA's first bipedal humanoid design and prototype program. The Paris startup unveiled it at the Machina Summit at Station F on 7 July 2026. Reporting from the event shows a human-scale biped with an exposed metal structure and safety tether, alongside a finished design with a neutral visor and technical-fabric covering. UMA also used the name Prototype Version 0 for a separate early test platform, so the two should not be treated as one set of specifications.

UMA calls its learning approach Real-Time Learning. The company demonstrated neural-network control on manipulation rigs and described training from human demonstrations, rewards and supervised practice rather than fixed scripted trajectories. Northstar is intended as the longer-term bipedal platform. CEO Rémi Cadène said the first industrial product would instead be a wheeled, dexterous robot, with warehouses and logistics as the initial market.

No official Northstar specification sheet has been published. A specialist tracker reports about 40 kg, but its 165 cm height, 15 kg payload and 24-degree-of-freedom figures are not corroborated by UMA or independent technical documentation and are therefore omitted. No price, order page or confirmed customer deployment was found, so Northstar remains a prototype.