Overview

The FF Nova is a small two-legged humanoid that American electric car manufacturer Faraday Future unveiled on October 15, 2026. It is aimed at developers, universities, and schools and is part of a robotics program with which the company is building a second pillar alongside its vehicles. In an initial phase, Faraday Future is distributing 100 units to selected developers and educational institutions.

Construction

At 49.7 centimeters tall and weighing 2.8 kilograms, the Nova fits on a desk. It features 20 degrees of freedom, with two allocated to the head, six to the arms, and twelve to the legs. On foot, it achieves 0.1 meters per second; on a removable wheeled base, it reaches 0.8 meters per second and can overcome obstacles up to two centimeters high. The head contains a two-inch display for facial expressions, complemented by lights on the sides, and a lidar sensor is mounted on top of the head.

Technology and AI

Computational power is 10 TOPS, supplemented by 8 GB of RAM and 32 GB of storage. In addition to the 2D lidar, a wide-angle camera with approximately 4 megapixels, a 3D ToF sensor, and a ring of three microphones perceive the environment, with the microphones also capable of locating noise sources and recognizing voices. On the software side, the robot supports ROS 2, SLAM, language models, and vision-language-action models. Faraday Future provides an open SDK and offers a reinforcement learning platform where skills can be trained in simulation and then transferred to the robot; a skills store for additional capabilities is announced.

Market Significance

The Nova belongs to the class of compact learning and development robots, where numerous educational and kit robot providers also operate. For universities, schools, and software developers, such a small biped is interesting because locomotion, voice control, and AI models can be tested without significant space requirements and without the risks associated with a human-sized robot. After the developer phase, Faraday Future intends to expand the user base and later offer a version for end customers, but has not provided timelines for this. The company has not disclosed who manufactures the hardware.