BitRobot 2025 Recap

At the start of 2025, BitRobot was just a working hypothesis: that a decentralized, subnet-based network could support real-world robotics research by coordinating hardware, contributors, compute, and data outside of traditional labs.

Over the year, that hypothesis was tested through live deployments and early subnets. We partnered with teams operating at the intersection of DePIN, AI, and crypto—including GEODNET, ionet, Virtuals, Rayvo, and others—while delivering data and resources to support research efforts from Google DeepMind, UC Berkeley, the University of Washington, Meta AI, and more.

These collaborations resulted in the release of the largest open-source sidewalk robotics dataset on Hugging Face, as well as more than one million completed egocentric data tasks with Virtuals.

Together, these early subnets validated BitRobot’s role as a network layer for coordinating resources to accelerate open robotics research. And Frodobots served as the development lab, responsible for building and operating the hardware platforms, games, and teleoperation systems that enabled experimentation and data generation across the network.

This update summarizes what was launched, tested, and validated in 2025.

February 2025 - Network Formation and Funding

At the beginning of 2025, Frodobots Lab raised $8M to support the launch of BitRobot and early network development. Capital was allocated toward hardware design, initial subnet deployment, and the operational infrastructure required to run experiments across multiple locations.

The round was led by Protocol VC, with participation from Big Brain Holdings, Fabric Ventures, Zee Prime Capital, Tioga Capital, Sfermion, Solana Ventures, Virtuals Protocol, and angel investors including Anatoly Yakovenko and Raj Gokal.

March 2025 - Whitepaper and Ultimate Fighting Bots (UFB) Launch

During this period, the BitRobot whitepaper was released, outlining the network’s approach to subnets, decentralized coordination, and incentive alignment for robotics research.

In March, FrodoBots also launched Ultimate Fighting Bots (UFB) , a competitive robot fighting league designed as a media and entertainment format for real-world robotics.

UFB explored whether entertainment could serve as an effective onramp for broader, mainstream, and cultural engagement with robots—bringing visibility to real machines, live operation, and current hardware capabilities.

May 2025 - Earth Rover Challenge and UC Berkeley Navigation Research

Earth Rover Challenge #2 launched at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) in Atlanta, introducing a real-world navigation benchmark using sidewalk robots operating outside controlled environments. This was a follow-up from the first Earth Rover Challenge in IROS Abu Dhabi 2024. https://earth-rover-challenge.github.io/

The 2nd iteration expanded participation to include both AI teams and human operators. Eight university AI teams and five human gamer teams from Yield Guild Games completed identical navigation tasks across eight cities. Human operators outperformed AI systems under these conditions, underscoring the gap between simulation-based performance and reliability in real-world deployment.

A research team from UC Berkeley was also able to train a navigation model (LogoNav) using crowd-sourced data generated through FrodoBots’ rover deployments. The model was evaluated on physical robots across six countries.

This work helped validate that globally distributed data collection, paired with consistent real-world evaluation, can support competitive navigation research.

June 2025 - Earth Rover Challenge Research from IROS 2024

In June 2025, researchers from Google DeepMind, academia, and Michael Cho (co-founder of BitRobot and FrodoBots) published an IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine article on the Earth Rover Challenge at IROS 2024.

The paper established Earth Rover Challenge as a credible real-world benchmark for low-cost outdoor robot navigation and showed that human operators still outperform autonomous systems in the wild, highlighting the gap between simulation and real-world deployment and further validating the need for open, real-world evaluation infrastructure.

July 2025 - UFB's First Live Fight Goes Viral

UFB hosted a series of live events during mid-2025, increasing public visibility for real-world robotics and introducing BitRobot to a wider audience.

Coverage included the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, New York Times, and SF Chronicle. Check out the write-up below:

• 'Peak SF' on a Friday Night Is a Robot Fight (NY Times)

• Humanioid Robots Were a Sci-Fi Dream. Suddenly They're Everywhere (Washington Post)

• The most San Francisco sport ever? Underground robot boxing enters the arena (SF Standard)

• Fighting robots, tech and more animate Mid-Market ‘vertical village’ (SF Examiner)

August 2025 - ET Fugi: First Live Subnet

In August, BitRobot launched ET Fugi, the network’s first live subnet.

ET Fugi is a rover-based game in which participants manually drive sidewalk robots through real environments, generating navigation data from everyday conditions such as curbs, obstacles, and pedestrian traffic.

This marked BitRobot’s transition from architectural design to an actively operating, permissionless subnet.

September 2025 - CoRL Announcements: Hardware and Research Support

At the Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL), BitRobot's co-founder Michael Cho keynoted and outlined the network's longer-term goal of supporting open, real-world robotics research through shared infrastructure.

Two initiatives were announced:

• RoboCap, a low-cost hardware platform designed to simplify global robot deployment

• A $5M Grand Challenge Fund, intended to support open-source model development and exploratory research across BitRobot subnets

Both initiatives were designed to reduce friction for partners and researchers seeking to deploy hardware and support open robotics R&D.

October 2025 - Berkeley CalHacks and SeeSaw (Subnet 05) Launch

BitRobot sponsored UC Berkeley Cal Hacks where over 16 student teams hacked with hardware provided by BitRobot and met speakers from OpenAI, Tesla Optimus, 1X Technology, Agility Robotics and more.

We also announced SN/05 (Subnet 05): SeeSaw in collaboration with Virtuals.

SeeSaw collects egocentric video data—first-person recordings of people performing everyday tasks using their iOS devices—to support research into human-object and human-environment interaction.

November 2025 - SeeSaw Reaches One Million Tasks

Within its first month, SeeSaw surpassed one million completed tasks.

The contribution rate demonstrated that incentives and gamified consumer interfaces can meaningfully accelerate data collection.

December 2025 - UFB's First International Showcase and TeleArms

UFB expanded internationally, with the UAE hosting the first global robot cage fighting event at Solana Breakpoint—bringing robot fighting in front of thousands of in-person and online spectators.

BitRobot also launched TeleArms, a teleoperation platform for robotic arms featuring LeKiwi and XLeRobot hardware from Sig Robotics Interest exceeded initial capacity when the beta waitlist was announced.

During the same period, FrodoBots also open-sourced the full Earth Rovers platform on Hugging Face, making a large-scale real-world sidewalk robotics dataset publicly available.

Key Takeaways from 2025

By the end of 2025, BitRobot had established a functioning network with active subnets, deployed hardware across multiple geographies, and produced datasets already used in external research.

• A subnet-based network can coordinate contributors, hardware, and data in live environments. Partnerships across infrastructure providers, hardware teams, and research institutions are essential to scaling this

• Games and incentives can drive participation and engagement beyond traditional research channels

• Real-world deployment produces datasets and evaluation results that are difficult to replicate in simulation

Looking Ahead

In 2026, the focus will shift to scaling the open robotics ecosystem—bringing in more partners, deploying more hardware, and generating larger, more diverse real-world datasets.

The goal is to support meaningful breakthroughs that emerge from an open, shared robotics lab, rather than closed, siloed environments.

The world’s open robotics lab is being built—together. Join us.

Discord: https://discord.com/invite/35q4HrekGt | bitrobot.ai