RoboParty RP1: a 160 N·m bipedal humanoid it plans to open-source

RoboParty, a Shanghai humanoid start-up, publicly demonstrated its RP1 bipedal robot at IROS 2026 in Pittsburgh on September 28 and formally announced it on October 3, 2026, describing it as a high-performance, full-stack open-source humanoid with peak joint torque of 160 N·m. The pitch matters because labs that want to change a humanoid’s actuators or low-level controller usually cannot do so on closed commercial robots; RoboParty is promising one where every layer is published.

For now that is a plan. The company says it will publish the RP1 open-source roadmap in October 2026, with broader software and hardware releases and a mass-production program later in the fourth quarter.

What is RP1?

RP1 is a bipedal humanoid aimed at research, education and embodied-AI development. It runs on PartyOS, RoboParty’s development platform, which bundles motion control with the company’s UFO training framework; Interesting Engineering reports that UFO uses unsupervised reinforcement learning to train low-level motion policies for dynamic behaviour. At IROS the company ran a “Kick Me” booth in which visitors pushed and kicked the robot to show balance recovery without predefined trajectories.

The release gives one hard number, the 160 N·m peak joint torque. It does not give height, weight, degrees of freedom, battery life or price. Those gaps matter for an open hardware project, because buyers and builders need the bill of materials and the actuator specification, not only a headline torque.

What does “full-stack open source” mean here?

RoboParty says the term covers more than mechanical files: it plans to open the mechanical design, actuator modules, motion control, simulation environments, SDKs and training tools. Its earlier project shows what that looks like in practice. The ROBOTO ORIGIN repository, launched in January 2026, publishes CAD drawings, PCB designs, firmware and reinforcement-learning training code built on ROS 2 and NVIDIA Isaac Sim and Isaac Lab, under the GPLv3 licence. The company cites more than 2,500 GitHub stars; the repository showed about 2,200 when we checked on October 7, 2026.

The licence for RP1 has not been stated. If it follows ROBOTO ORIGIN’s GPLv3, software changes that companies distribute would have to be shared on the same terms, which suits universities better than commercial integrators. That is the main question to watch in the October roadmap, alongside whether the Romomo actuators are released as buildable designs or only sold as modules. Other open efforts have opened one layer at a time — Asimov released its walking training code, and Intrinsic opened its robotics software core — so a complete hardware-to-policy release would be a step beyond them.

Who is behind RoboParty?

The company was founded in Shanghai in March 2025 by Huang Yi, born in 2004, who built the AlexBot series of bipeds as an undergraduate at Harbin Institute of Technology, according to ChinaVenture. Interesting Engineering reports a team drawn from Tsinghua, Stanford, Carnegie Mellon and other institutions. It has raised several rounds in quick succession; 36Kr reported on July 15, 2026 that RoboParty had closed Angel++ and Pre-A rounds totalling about 500 million yuan, with the Pre-A funded by battery maker CATL and earlier backers including Shunwei Capital and Xiaomi returning. That figure is single-source and was not confirmed by the company in English-language materials.