ROBOTIS OH! GYM! Puts Students on AI Sapiens K1
ROBOTIS closed the first OH! GYM! cohort with a 31 August showcase at its Seoul Gangseo headquarters. OH! GYM! is Open Humanoid GYM: a month-long program (21 July–21 August on the company docs) that puts students on the open AI Sapiens K1 and asks them to train full-body motions in simulation, then run them on the metal.
58 teams from 17 schools applied. Four were selected: Gachon University (iRASC), Seoul National University (SHAPE), Yonsei University (RoboIN), and Seoul National University of Science and Technology (RnD).
What each team trained
ROBOTIS’s project page lists the themes. KOREA WAVE’s 1 September report, via Yahoo News, adds what actually ran on stage:
- Gachon / iRASC — Obstacle run. Low crawl, one-leg stand, push-ups, burpees, and a limbo under 60–70 cm. The YouTube still shows the K1 in a cap next to an orange ball.
- Seoul National / SHAPE — K-pop. Choreography to ATEEZ’s “BAD.”
- Yonsei / RoboIN — Taekwondo. Kick combinations; WAVE says the robot lost balance and fell during the demo.
- SeoulTech / RnD — Parkour / acrobatics. Figure-skating butterfly and a handstand. WAVE notes the handstand is hard because the legs outweigh the upper body.
All four teams used NVIDIA Isaac Sim and Google MuJoCo for reinforcement learning, WAVE reports: tens of kinds of motions, tens of thousands of simulated repeats, then friction and actuator-limit tweaks to shrink the sim-to-real gap. SeoulTech’s Chae Seungjun said a backflip only scored if the hands planted and the body rotated a full 360 degrees, so the policy could not cheat the reward.
The platform underneath
K1 is the same open research body ROBOTIS has been documenting: 1355 mm, 35 kg, 23 DoF, DYNAMIXEL-Q actuators. The YouTube description says students went from simulation to hardware in a month. ROBOTIS already open-sourced motion code in early August; WAVE says mechanical CAD and electronics are planned next.
CEO Kim Byungsoo (WAVE’s spelling) compared the student motions to last year’s World Humanoid Robot Games entries and said that with cameras and better algorithms, Korea could compete with China by 2027. That is his forecast, not a result.
ROBOTIS gave all four teams plaques and prize money, per WAVE. Cohort 2 applications are already closed on the docs page. An OH! Challenge! is listed for 2027.
A Human’s Take
A month on a real 23-DoF humanoid is a better education than another year of watching Unitree clips. The fallen taekwondo kick is the honest frame. I care that they had to rewrite the backflip reward so the sim would stop awarding a shrug. If ROBOTIS actually ships the CAD next, this gym becomes a farm team. If it stays a branded seminar with four robots against the wall, it is still a good student film.