ROBOTIS launches $7k AI Sapiens kit
- South Korea’s ROBOTIS unveiled AI Sapiens K0, a 1.3-meter open-source humanoid built for embodied artificial intelligence research and scheduled for first-half 2026 sales. - ROBOTIS says the 34-kilogram robot has 23 degrees of freedom, uses 23 Dynamixel-Q actuators, and will cost in the mid-to-low 10 million won range. - The launch extends ROBOTIS’s long open-source robotics push as cheaper humanoids pressure research markets. (robotis.com)
A humanoid robot is a research machine with legs and arms that lets engineers test software on real hardware instead of only in simulation. ROBOTIS has now put that idea into a new platform called AI Sapiens K0, with sales planned for the first half of 2026. (robotis.com) (biz.chosun.com) ROBOTIS says the K0 stands 1.3 meters tall, weighs 34 kilograms, and has 23 degrees of freedom across its head, arms, legs, and waist. The company describes it as a baseline hardware-and-software platform that other researchers can extend. (robotis.com) The company says the stack will be fully open source, including the bill of materials, computer-aided design files, source code, simulation assets, and tutorials. That means labs can inspect the design, reproduce it, and modify it instead of working from a sealed commercial system. (robotis.com) The core hardware is ROBOTIS’s new Dynamixel-Q actuator line, using a quasi-direct-drive design that cuts gearing so joints respond faster and absorb shocks more flexibly. ROBOTIS says that setup is aimed at balancing, locomotion, and manipulation under real contact and sensor noise. (robotis.com) (biz.chosun.com) ROBOTIS says AI Sapiens is being built for imitation learning and reinforcement learning, two common ways to train robots from examples and repeated trial-and-error. The company says training is conducted in NVIDIA Isaac Sim before policies are transferred onto the physical robot. (robotis.com) The pricing is the part likely to get the most attention from universities and startup labs. ChosunBiz reported on April 20 that ROBOTIS plans to launch AI Sapiens in the first half of 2026 at a mid-to-low 10 million won price, roughly the range often translated to about $7,000 to $9,000. (biz.chosun.com) That would place it below Unitree’s G1, which Unitree markets from $13,500 on its store and previously described as “Price from $16K” in its July 2024 launch materials. The comparison matters because low-cost humanoids have become a proxy for who can get embodied artificial intelligence tools into more labs fastest. (shop.unitree.com) (unitree.com) ROBOTIS is not entering the field from scratch. The company says its open-source humanoid line dates back to the ROBOTIS OP platforms and that THORMANG, introduced for the 2015 Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency Robotics Challenge, was its full-size open-source humanoid for field use. (robotis.com) ChosunBiz reported that ROBOTIS is pitching AI Sapiens as a mostly in-house machine, with a 97% technological internalization rate and actuator demand that exceeded shipments last year. In that account, ROBOTIS framed the robot as a Korean answer to Chinese humanoid momentum led by companies such as Unitree. (biz.chosun.com) The next test is whether ROBOTIS can turn a demo robot into a reproducible kit that ships on schedule in 2026. If it does, AI Sapiens K0 would give researchers a cheaper open-source body for testing locomotion, balance, and manipulation on real machines. (robotis.com) (biz.chosun.com)
