High Bit Clone: Musculoskeletal, super-intelligent androids — straight out of sci-fi
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Dec 11, 2025 
Dhanush Radhakrishnan, cofounder and CEO of Clone, builds musculoskeletal androids using artificial fluidic muscles and anatomically accurate skeletons. He discusses why muscles over motors, early engineering tradeoffs that sped development, durability challenges and creative fixes, and the data strategy mixing mocap, teleoperation, and egocentric video to scale toward an untethered biped.
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Let Biology Set The Actuation Blueprint
- Designing robots around human anatomy lets you reuse one actuator design across the body instead of engineering custom actuators for each joint.
- Hit human-like muscle metrics (force, displacement, speed) and the rest of the musculoskeletal system becomes achievable.
From Fragile To Tossable Hand
- Early prototype hands broke every few minutes but improved rapidly with focused work and a $0.5M angel round.
- Within 18 months the biomechanical hand survived being thrown across a room and was demo-ready for seed fundraising.
Stage With Minimal Hardware First
- Prioritize a minimal, testable scope: build an actuation-only musculoskeletal hand before adding sensing or complex control.
- Use open-loop sequences to demo capabilities while hardware durability and controllers mature.