Humanoid robotics and exoskeletons lead latest IHMC newsletter

When Jared Li was job-hunting in late 2020, he had never heard of the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition (IHMC).

He was helping his parents in West Lafayette, Ind., move when he looked into IHMC at the recommendation of colleagues from his alma mater, the Georgia Institute of Technology. Then he saw a 2015 video of the DARPA Robotics Challenge, an international competition in which the IHMC robotics team placed second.

It seemed familiar, Li says, and then he remembered watching it in real time as a young undergraduate.

“I remember just being like, oh, so this is that place,” Li says. “I got really excited about the opportunity.”

He joined IHMC in April 2021 and since has served as project manager and lead engineer on multiple exoskeletons. Li was wearing the Eva exoskeleton in December 2024 for its first out-of-lab field test. You can watch the test run here.

“The ability to wear it yourself, take it out into the world, and understand what the end user is going to feel is tremendously helpful for future development,” Li says.

Eva is a project funded by the U.S. Department of Energy in collaboration with Georgia Tech and Sandia National Laboratories. The out-of-lab excursion was a critical milestone for the project because it demonstrates the ability of the device to operate outside of controlled environments. In March of 2025, Li and the team presented at the Department of Energy’s Waste Management Symposium.

The Eva collaboration aims to help address the healthspan issues of a specialized, aging workforce, but there potentially are a host of other applications for the work.

“There are still so many barriers to cross,” Li says.  “Eventually we could expand the upper body to add attachments to be able to completely cover the whole body and to do very complex, very difficult tasks.”

You can read more about Eva in the latest edition of IHMC’s Newsletter, which is now live. Visit our website to have the newsletter delivered to your inbox.

IHMC is a not-for-profit research institute of the Florida University System where researchers pioneer science and technology aimed at leveraging and extending human capabilities. IHMC researchers and staff collaborate extensively with the government, industry and academia to help develop breakthrough technologies. IHMC research partners have included: DARPA, the National Science Foundation, NASA, Army, Navy, Air Force, National Institutes of Health, IBM, Microsoft, Honda, Boeing, Lockheed, and many others.