PolkaWorld will vote NAY on this proposal.
The positives:
Our concerns:
Based on these concerns, we will be voting NAY on this proposal.
Thank you for presenting this exciting project and showcasing the AI built over AAG. However, at this time, our DAO members have decided to vote Nay on this initiative. 1) Given the recent volatility and rapid shifts in market momentum, there is concern about the timing of this proposal. We feel a strong obligation to ensure the Treasury remains well-positioned to support high-priority initiatives, particularly those focused on building critical infrastructure that clearly drives user adoption into the Polkadot ecosystem. 2) There remains uncertainty around how this project will be integrated into the broader Polkadot ecosystem and what tangible benefits it would deliver. To be candid, some members felt the proposal resembled an experiment funded by Treasury resources, rather than a clearly defined and outcome-driven initiative. Thank you REEEEEEEEEE DAO
There’s hardly a better time to start building the world’s first Humanoid Robot SDK for integration with Web3 cloud platforms than 2025.
As we stated at the beginning of our proposal—and we genuinely believe this—humanoid robots could become the largest consumers of services within the Polkadot ecosystem. Unlike humans, robots need much more than just a crypto wallet. To function, robots require everything Polkadot offers as part of its core infrastructure—just like with any traditional cloud environment.
Humanoid Robots rely on secure state transitions of digital twin data, telemetry transfer and storage, cloud computing, and interaction with environmental models before executing real-world actions. All of this could engage not just one, but dozens of Polkadot parachain applications.
And we’re one of the very few teams in the ecosystem with a proven track record (20 R&D projects in Robotics + Web3 over the last 10 years) that can realistically build such an adapter to connect Polkadot to real robot functionality.
I hope this comment helps you take another thoughtful look at our proposal.
Thank you for presenting this exciting project and showcasing the AI built over AAG. However, at this time, our DAO members have decided to vote Nay on this initiative. 1) Given the recent volatility and rapid shifts in market momentum, there is concern about the timing of this proposal. We feel a strong obligation to ensure the Treasury remains well-positioned to support high-priority initiatives, particularly those focused on building critical infrastructure that clearly drives user adoption into the Polkadot ecosystem. 2) There remains uncertainty around how this project will be integrated into the broader Polkadot ecosystem and what tangible benefits it would deliver. To be candid, some members felt the proposal resembled an experiment funded by Treasury resources, rather than a clearly defined and outcome-driven initiative. Thank you REEEEEEEEEE DAO
By building Polkadot Humanoid Robot SDK we aim for robotics to become yet another sustainable pillar and source of demand for Polkadot.
I work with robots for the past 10 years and humanoid robots just became technically feasible. My team is one of the first to get real experience with them and we are doing it on Polkadot.
But I now see the opportunity is much bigger than we can chew alone and it requires close collaboration between multiple teams on Polkadot. Humanoid robots are a unique new category that is big enough for Nvidia to make it a major part of their narrative. I actually believe this ref is worth its money to Polkadot in “exposure” alone, but this is not a marketing proposal.
Robotics engineers should use @CrustNetwork to store digital twins, use @Acurast for fast LLM inference, use @PhalaNetwork to run simulations for reinforcement learning. These are just a few mentions that fit really well, but all our teams enjoy the shared security. With our ref we will create a practical toolset and guides that normal robotics developers can use to solve their daily tasks.
Polkadot is what makes our collaboration possible in a trustless way. Polkadot is where we all meet, humans and robots. We bring real use cases that highlight unique benefit of Polkadot.
This is of direct benefit to Polkadot.
You won’t find a team of 20+ specialists, each with 5+ years of experience at the frontier of web3 and robotics/iot experiments. As of today, Airalab / Robo core dev is the only such team on the planet
Seems like a great project!
Best proposal in a while, finally real utility being proposed here!
I’m really glad that these guys have started working in this direction — it’s definitely an exciting topic.
I work on developing dApps with the Robonomics team, and I’ve helped them before with connecting robots to dApps. If they need my help, I’m ready to assist. I’m confident they’ll achieve the goals they’ve set.
Hello everyone!
I’m Vadim and I’m being a part of Robonomics team since 2017. Right now I’m a co-founder of Pinout LTD, Cyprus, where I do affordable, privacy-first smart home solutions. But in the past I have worked on robotics projects, to name a few:
water environmental inspector https://youtu.be/4iCkdF2UJmo and
Gaka-chu - robot painter https://youtu.be/GxlYxaykqTU
I’m not involved directly into the current laboratory initiative but I will be glad to help and I can tell these guys will do their job with passion. Big aye from me!
The Robonomics Devops team is ready to service humanoid robots!
Expensive, dubious use case
@162bCUcNCEkFJdn8bp2XnuoPXusDisbhJAntbUH1ctDfu88a
Humanoid robots can become significant consumers of a wide range of services within the Polkadot infrastructure, as their operation depends on constant connectivity to cloud services. Transforming Polkadot into the cloud platform where, at the market’s early stage, humanoid robots will log their operations, perform simulation and model training tasks, and interact with users—including, most notably, the scenario of paying robots for their work—is undoubtedly an ambitious goal, but by no means a foolish one. Meanwhile, the operating costs of an experienced robotics lab of five specialists with the necessary equipment are typically two to three times higher; however, for us, gaining initial support is more important than earning direct profits. After 1 year our aim in close collaboration with the Polkadot dev community to enable further development of Humanoid Robot SDK project after this initial step, much like a successful GitHub repository.
How is this different from any other computing system connecting to the blockchain. I don't understand why Polkadot needs this SDK to be developed, nor do I see why you need a blockchain for this use case, beyond payments. Nothing on chain will be able to prove that any work was done in real life, so automating that will only lead to abuse.
Voting no, as the price tag is high and it does not appear to have been well thought out
@162bCUcNCEkFJdn8bp2XnuoPXusDisbhJAntbUH1ctDfu88a
Integrating robots is fundamentally different from simply connecting a computer to Polkadot. The key difference lies in the fact that a physical device is being controlled — with all the unique characteristics of its onboard computer.
The main task for the SDK development team is to explore the software architecture of the humanoid robots available today (or coming soon), identify integration points for key operations — such as launch commands or receiving sensor data — and make all of this compatible with Polkadot.
Our goal is for developers to open the SDK and easily access commands like “start the robot” or “fetch the last 5 minutes of telemetry,” without needing to worry about the onboard communication, internal code structure, or robot-specific engineering details.
This is the core mission of the Polkadot Humanoid Robot SDK: to provide real engineering integration between the Polkadot cloud and the parts of a robot’s execution logic where such integration is appropriate and meaningful.
Our hands-on R&D experience with Ethereum and Polkadot — working with robotic arms, drones, and quadrupeds — gives us the foundation to turn this SDK into a powerful tool for AI teams, simplifying the development of robot applications.
When it comes to use cases, payments to robots are already a huge topic — and whoever manages to simplify it will have done something great. But robots need much more than just payments — they require a full-fledged cloud infrastructure. They need to train models, store logs, receive commands from user applications, and much more.
So I’d actually say the opposite: humanoid robots have the potential to become the largest consumers of the Polkadot cloud — in terms of computing, data storage, and user interaction. And we’re going to provide a simplified tool for making that happen, in the form of an SDK.
How is this different from any other computing system connecting to the blockchain. I don't understand why Polkadot needs this SDK to be developed, nor do I see why you need a blockchain for this use case, beyond payments. Nothing on chain will be able to prove that any work was done in real life, so automating that will only lead to abuse.
Voting no, as the price tag is high and it does not appear to have been well thought out
Let's go!
Here’s a little preview of what we’re planning to explore in our lab:
https://x.com/berman_ivan/status/1905751377839821280
There’s a big dream floating around in the humanoid robotics world right now — building a truly general-purpose robot that can handle pretty much any task in any environment. There are plenty of different tasks here from true AI to new types of batteries. But there is also a whole layer of challenges that can be tackled with the decentralized stack from Polkadot Cloud and its rollups — trusted data, secure access, scalable updates, federated learning, platform neutrality, economic autonomy. With the right tools in place, an entire market of autonomous robot services can be built on top of that.
If the community approves this proposal, we will gratefully get to work to create a coherent software and conceptual framework that could actually help humanoid robots make their way into our everyday lives.
I am very inspired by the Cyberpunk Lab initiative! The integration of Web3 with humanoid robotics has great potential. Cyberpunk Lab and Polkadot are the undisputed leaders in this.
Are rarely seen proposals with real Utility. The technological innovation of this one is huge!
If our proposal to fund 12 months of work by a highly experienced R&D team of roboticists is approved by Polkadot’s onchain governance, I’ll take the lead in developing web3-based applications for the first generation of humanoid robots arriving in 2025–2026. I’ll design an architecture for user access to robots based on real-world projects from the Polkadot ecosystem, combining them with our own code to create practical use case examples — from taking out the trash to unloading boxes from a truck at a construction site. And that's just the beginning.
When you add to this the fact that the technical and economic interaction between humans and machines can be seamlessly built on Web3 technologies, you get a clear win-win: first, Polkadot enables globally accessible internet services for robots anywhere in the world; second, the Web3 ecosystem allows us to natively explore models like hourly payments for robot services — a concept I believe will become the foundation of the robot labor market in the 2030s.
I also bring with me a decade of experience experimenting at the intersection of Web3 and robotics, and I’m fully committed to applying everything I've learned to this effort.
Over the next 12 months, our team will transparently analyze the technical side of commercially available humanoid robots and test them hands-on. We'll aim to get the most out of the robots hitting the market over the next two years. Based on our findings, we plan to develop the Humanoid Robot SDK along with a few simple but practical applications for everyday users. Everything — from sending commands to receiving telemetry — will run on open-source software and globally independent infrastructure for robot connectivity.
If these applications prove useful to early robot owners, we could generate meaningful network activity for Polkadot.
Wish us luck! And if you hold DOT, we’d truly appreciate your support on our proposal.
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