Building and Validating an Open Robotics Network

At the start of 2025, BitRobot Network 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.

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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_io, @rayvo_xyz, 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. @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) — @ufbots — 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 on-ramp for broader 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.

🔗 https://earth-rover-challenge.github.io/

The second iteration expanded participation to include both AI teams and human operators. Eight university AI teams and five human gamer teams from @yieldguid completed identical navigation tasks across eight cities.

Human operators outperformed AI systems, underscoring the gap between simulation-based performance and real-world reliability.

A UC Berkeley research team trained a navigation model (LogoNav) using crowd-sourced data generated through FrodoBots’ rover deployments. The model was evaluated on physical robots across six countries, validating globally distributed data collection paired with consistent real-world evaluation.

June 2025

Earth Rover Challenge Research from IROS 2024

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 reaffirmed that human operators still outperform autonomous systems in the wild.

July 2025

UFB’s First Live Fight Goes Viral

UFB hosted a series of live events that significantly increased public visibility for real-world robotics and introduced BitRobot to a broader audience.

Coverage included:

New York Times — “Peak SF on a Friday Night Is a Robot Fight”
Washington Post — “Humanoid Robots Were a Sci-Fi Dream. Suddenly They’re Everywhere”
SF Standard — “The Most San Francisco Sport Ever?”
SF Examiner — “Fighting Robots Animate Mid-Market Vertical Village”

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August 2025

ET Fugi: First Live Subnet

BitRobot launched ET Fugi (@et_fugi), the network’s first live subnet.

ET Fugi is a rover-based game where 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 co-founder @micoolcho outlined the network’s long-term goal of supporting open, real-world robotics research through shared infrastructure.

Two initiatives were announced:

RoboCap — a low-cost hardware platform for global deployment
$5M Grand Challenge Fund — supporting open-source model development and exploratory research

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October 2025

Berkeley CalHacks and SeeSaw (Subnet 05)

BitRobot sponsored UC Berkeley CalHacks, where over 16 student teams built with BitRobot hardware and heard from speakers at OpenAI, 1X, Agility Robotics, and more.

Subnet SN/05: SeeSaw, launched with @virtuals_io, collects egocentric video data from users performing everyday tasks to support human-object interaction research.

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, demonstrating how incentives and gamified interfaces can accelerate real-world data collection.

December 2025

UFB International Showcase and TeleArms

UFB expanded internationally with its first global robot cage-fighting event at Solana Breakpoint Abu Dhabi, bringing real-world robotics to thousands of spectators.

BitRobot also launched TeleArms, a teleoperation platform for robotic arms using LeKiwi and XLeRobot hardware from @sigrobotics. Demand exceeded initial beta capacity.

During the same period, FrodoBots open-sourced the Earth Rovers platform on Hugging Face, releasing 7,000 hours of driving data from 40+ cities, curated with UC Berkeley researchers.

Key Takeaways from 2025

A subnet-based network can coordinate contributors, hardware, and data in live environments
Partnerships across infrastructure, hardware, and research institutions are essential to scale
Games and incentives meaningfully expand participation
Real-world deployment produces datasets impossible to replicate in simulation

Looking Ahead

In 2026, the focus shifts to scaling the open robotics ecosystem — more partners, more hardware, and larger, more diverse real-world datasets.

The goal is to support breakthroughs from an open, shared robotics lab, not closed, siloed environments.

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