ROBOTIS 'AI Sapiens' Humanoid

A humanoid robot is a two-legged machine built to balance, walk, and use arms in the same spaces as people. ROBOTIS has now put that idea into an open-source research platform called AI Sapiens. (ai.robotis.com) ROBOTIS says the first model, K0, stands 1.3 meters tall, weighs 34 kilograms, and has 23 degrees of freedom — the count of movable joints across its head, arms, waist, and legs. The company lists 14 QM-060 and 9 QM-080 Dynamixel-Q actuators in the robot. (ai.robotis.com) Actuators are the robot’s muscles: each one combines a motor, gears, control electronics, and networking in a joint module. ROBOTIS says its Dynamixel-Q design is a quasi-direct-drive setup aimed at low backlash and torque control for balancing and manipulation. (ai.robotis.com; en.robotis.com) ROBOTIS says AI Sapiens is meant for “physical AI,” its term for software that learns in simulation or from human demonstrations and then runs on a real machine. The company says the platform supports reinforcement learning in NVIDIA Isaac Sim and imitation learning through a leader-follower data collection system. (ai.robotis.com) The company is releasing more than the robot body. ROBOTIS says K0 ships as a fully open-source stack with hardware bills of materials, CAD files, source code, simulation assets, and tutorials so labs can rebuild and modify the system. (ai.robotis.com) Price is the part likely to get universities and smaller labs looking. ROBOTIS has not posted a public list price on its product page, but industry reports and reposts of the company’s launch materials put K0 in the mid-to-low 10 million won range, or about $7,000 to $8,700, with a launch planned for the first half of 2026. (robohorizon.com; sotwe.com) That would place AI Sapiens below some better-known humanoid platforms aimed at developers. RoboHorizon, citing the launch, compared it with Unitree’s G1, which it said starts around $16,000. (robohorizon.com) ROBOTIS is not new to open robot hardware. Its OP3 humanoid has long been marketed as an open platform for research and education, and the company spent 2025 expanding a broader “Physical AI” lineup that includes AI Worker, OMY, and OMX systems with ROS 2 tools and training resources. (en.robotis.com; ai.robotis.com; robotis.us) The shift is from small teaching robots and robot arms to a larger biped that can serve as a common baseline. ROBOTIS says K0 is the “first humanoid in that line,” with open training artifacts and documentation meant to give research, education, and product teams the same starting point. (ai.robotis.com) The immediate test is whether ROBOTIS can turn that documentation-first pitch into shipped machines on schedule. If it does, AI Sapiens could put a full-size open humanoid into more classrooms and labs before 2026 is out. (ai.robotis.com; robohorizon.com)