Our Roadmap for Open Robotics
Announcements
Powering the collective to accelerate embodied AI.
Sep 28, 2025
Introduction
Robotics is at an inflection point. Goldman Sachs projects a $38 billion market by 2035; Morgan Stanley estimates $5 trillion by 2050. At the same time, labor shortages could leave an 85 million job gap by 2030, costing the global economy $8.5 trillion in lost GDP. Aging populations, shrinking workforces, and supply chain pressures are fueling demand across logistics, manufacturing, healthcare, and home care.
For decades, robotics struggled because the “brains” weren’t ready. That has changed. Breakthroughs in AI, powered by leaps in compute and billions in new investment, have pulled development timelines forward by decades. The long-anticipated ChatGPT moment for robotics is finally coming into view.
But here’s the risk: if robotics stays locked in closed labs, breakthroughs will come slower, cost more, and benefit only a select few. The alternative is an open model — one that harnesses researchers, builders, teleoperators, hobbyists, and everyday contributors. History shows that collective effort, not walled gardens, unlocks the next leap forward.
That’s why we’re building BitRobot: the world’s open robotics lab. With the right coordination, incentives, and infrastructure embodied AI can advance in the open — creating a future where progress isn’t gated by billion-dollar budgets, but accelerated by all of us.
Our Mission
Our mission is to accelerate breakthroughs in robotics by making embodied AI open, collaborative, and rewarding — achieving progress no single lab can do alone.
The Problem Today
Despite all the excitement around AI, progress in physical robotics is being held back. Hardware is improving, but without funding, data, and real-world testing, embodied AI can’t reach its full potential.
Today, robotics R&D is:
Closed: most innovation sits behind corporate walls.
Fragmented: researchers lack shared datasets, tools, and benchmarks.
Underfunded: few resources flow to the long tail of innovators working on the hardest problems.
If robotics continues in this state, progress could remain slow, concentrated, and unevenly distributed. Innovation will risk being confined to a few large players, while independent researchers, smaller labs, and everyday contributors are left with limited resources to participate. Without broader collaboration, breakthroughs arrive later, costs stay high, and society misses out on the full potential of embodied AI.
The Possibility
Robotics R&D doesn’t have to be this way. Instead, imagine an open network of subnets — missions where people, robots, and compute are coordinated to push embodied AI forward.
Through BitRobot, contributors form subnets to take on specific challenges: uploading egocentric video data to train robots on everyday activities, piloting robotic arms in completing manipulation tasks, or validating new navigation policies at scale.
For researchers, subnets unlock access to massive datasets, distributed fleets, and compute resources. For everyday people, they create new ways to take part in robotics directly — and to share in the rewards when their contributions drive measurable progress.
We already have a proof of concept with the ET Fugi subnet. Thousands of contributors teleoperated rovers across sidewalks, generating over 10,000 hours of driving data — and creating the largest open-source sidewalk navigation dataset ever created.
The more contributors who join a subnet, the richer the data; the better the models, the faster the breakthroughs. With every verified contribution, rewards flow back to participants, fueling a self-sustaining loop of progress.
Our Approach
BitRobot covers the full robotics R&D stack, built on three pillars:
1 / Coordinate
Subnet owners define open missions around real challenges: training rovers to navigate crowded sidewalks, testing robot arms on complex furniture assembly, or improving dexterity for delicate tasks like folding origami.
2 / Execute
Subnets organize global contributors and fleets of robots to deliver results. We’ve already seen this with the ET Fugi subnet, which mobilized thousands of contributors to generate the largest open dataset of its kind.
By crowdsourcing contributors, subnets let researchers push beyond their own labs — training models, testing policies, and validating algorithms directly in diverse real-world environments.
3 / Verify & Reward
Every contribution — from a rover’s navigation log, to hours spent maneuvering, to the results of a new policy test — is measured through Verifiable Robotic Work (VRW), making progress transparent, accountable, and trusted. By validating results openly, subnets ensure quality while rewarding the contributors whose work moves robotics forward.
Together, these steps turn robotics research into an open, coordinated loop of progress, accelerating embodied AI at the speed and scale society needs.
The Roadmap
AI is advancing at unprecedented speed, but robotics has struggled to keep pace. Without open data, hardware, and real-world testing, embodied AI risks falling further behind.
BitRobot offers a path forward:
For researchers: access to large-scale data, distributed hardware and compute, and a global community.
For contributors: meaningful ways to participate in robotics early and be rewarded.
For society: faster progress toward embodied AI that can expand human capabilities.
Our roadmap:
Launch more open subnets tackling foundational robotics challenges.
Build the embodied AI loop: coordinate → execute → verify → reward.
Scale contributions and datasets globally.
Fund and accelerate moonshot research goals.
Conclusion
The future of robotics doesn’t belong to a single lab. It belongs to all of us.
We’re still early, and the foundations we build now will shape everything that follows.
Open beats siloed. Together beats closed.
Imagine a network where global fleets of robots generate massive shared datasets and models, advancing embodied AI at a scale never seen before. Collective effort could pioneer breakthroughs in navigation, dexterity, and manipulation that bring billions of robots into workplaces, homes, and cities.
That is the future we believe in: robotics driven by the collective, aimed at solving humanity’s biggest challenges and opening new frontiers. BitRobot is here to make that future open so that anyone, anywhere can contribute.
The World’s Open Robotics Lab. Accelerating Embodied AI breakthroughs, together.
