RoboParty showed the RP1 (also branded ROBOTO 01) at IROS 2026 on 28 September 2026 and completed the launch in mid-October, under the press-release headline “Born to Be Open.” The claim is a full-stack open-source humanoid: mechanical structures, actuators, motion control, simulation environments, SDKs and training tools.
We have been burned by that claim twice this month — a benchmark whose “code available” link 404s and a paper whose real repo carries no licence at all — so rather than quote the release, we queried the GitHub API and counted.
The hardware
- 1.35 m tall
- 24 active degrees of freedom on the base RP1; 30 DoF on the RP1 Pro
- Rockchip RK3588 as the main processor
- The Pro adds an Allwinner A733 and an NVIDIA Jetson Orin NX compute module
The DoF figure is worth stating carefully because the headline number circulating is 30, and 30 is the Pro. The base robot is 24.
The licence audit
The Roboparty GitHub organisation holds 71 public repositories. Breaking them down by machine-readable SPDX licence:
| Licence | Repos |
|---|---|
| GPL-3.0 | 34 |
| none | 13 |
| MIT | 6 |
| NOASSERTION | 5 |
| CERN-OHL-W-2.0 | 4 |
| Apache-2.0 | 4 |
| GPL-2.0 | 2 |
| BSD-3-Clause | 1 |
| BSD-2-Clause | 1 |
| CC-BY-4.0 | 1 |
The good news first, because it is genuinely good.
Roboparty/RP1 exists, is licensed GPL-3.0, carries 727 stars, and was pushed to today. Its description is unambiguous: “RP1: An OpenSource Full-Stack Platform for Agentic Humanoids.” RP1_firmware is GPL-3.0. RP1_hardware is CERN-OHL-W-2.0 — the CERN Open Hardware Licence, weakly reciprocal variant, which is an actual open-hardware licence written by lawyers for exactly this purpose, not a README saying “feel free to use this.” Four repos carry it, including rpo_hardware and rpo_description for the predecessor.
The predecessor itself, roboto_origin, is GPL-3.0 with 2,704 stars — open-sourced in January 2026 and clearly the project that built the audience for this one.
A ROS 2 deployment framework, inference, motor control, BMS, IMU, LiDAR, camera, navigation, XR teleoperation and whole-body teleoperation packages are all present and all GPL-3.0. That is not a token release. That is the stack.
The gaps
18 of 71 repositories — the 13 with no licence file plus the 5 GitHub cannot classify — have no licence you can rely on. Under default copyright, no licence means all rights reserved, however public the code is.
The ones that matter, by attention:
| Repo | Licence | Stars |
|---|---|---|
UFO | NOASSERTION | 334 |
roboparty_train | none | 201 |
P-BFM | NOASSERTION | 95 |
I-BFM-Code | NOASSERTION | 61 |
dm_pd_optimizer | none | 13 |
Look at what those are. roboparty_train is the Isaac Lab training workspace for RPO locomotion policies — the thing you need if you want to train your own gait rather than run the shipped one. UFO is an unsupervised RL framework for humanoid control. P-BFM is perceptive behavioural foundation models for terrain-adaptive humanoid locomotion. I-BFM-Code is training code plus interactive Carry Box, Push Box and Kick Box tasks.
So the pattern is legible and, honestly, familiar: the robot is open and the brain is ambiguous. Mechanical files, firmware, motor drivers and ROS plumbing have proper licences. The learning research — the part that is current, competitive and probably has a paper attached — does not.
NOASSERTION specifically means there is a licence-like file that GitHub’s classifier could not match to a known licence. That is sometimes a custom research licence with field-of-use restrictions, sometimes a modified MIT, sometimes a citation request in a LICENSE file. You have to open each one and read it. It is not the same as nothing, but it is not something you can clear with a script either.
What to do with that
If you are evaluating RP1 as a platform:
- Build and modify the robot: covered. CERN-OHL-W-2.0 on hardware, GPL-3.0 on firmware and the ROS stack. Note that GPL-3.0 is copyleft — derivative work you distribute has to carry the same terms. For a research robot that is usually fine; for a product it is a decision.
- Run the shipped behaviours: covered.
- Train your own policies using their workspace: read
roboparty_trainfirst. As of today it has no licence. - Build on their foundation models: open the LICENSE file in
UFO,P-BFMandI-BFM-Codeindividually and read it before you plan around them.
None of this makes “Born to Be Open” false. Measured against the field, 34 GPL-3.0 repos and four CERN-OHL hardware repos is among the most substantive open-hardware humanoid releases there has been, and the predecessor’s 2,704 stars suggest people actually use it. It is just not uniform, and the non-uniformity is concentrated in the most valuable 18 repos rather than scattered at random.
Which is the thing worth checking, every time, on every project that leads with the word open — including the ones that turn out to deserve it.
Sources
- RoboParty on GitHub
- Roboparty/RP1 — GPL-3.0
- Roboparty/RP1_hardware — CERN-OHL-W-2.0
- Roboparty/roboto_origin — the predecessor
- RoboParty Unveils RP1, a Full-Stack Open-Source Humanoid Robot at IROS — PR Newswire
- Born to Be Open: RoboParty Launches RP1 — PR Newswire
- RoboParty launches open-source RP1 humanoid robot — Engineering.com