Booster Robotics frames its humanoids as a developer-first platform for education and research, and this interview leans into the “let people build on it” idea rather than a finished home-assistant pitch. The demo focuses on whole-body control: stable walking, quick recovery when pushed, and pre-baked motion clips like the Michael Jackson routine as a practical test for gait timing and joint coordination. https://www.booster.tech/booster-t1/
A key theme is how balance gets trained: reinforcement learning inside simulation, where the robot is exposed to lots of perturbed scenarios until it learns a robust policy for keeping its center of mass and contact forces inside safe limits. Filmed at CES Las Vegas 2026, the booth moment makes that tangible—you can physically shove the robot and watch it absorb the impulse with ankle/hip strategies instead of tipping over.
Booster positions the larger T1 as its first model and talks about modularity—swapping end-effectors, adding dexterous hands, and integrating third-party components as the manipulation stack matures. Publicly listed T1 materials commonly emphasize a full developer API, ROS2 compatibility, and simulation tooling, plus an onboard compute tier based on NVIDIA Jetson Orin (often cited up to ~100 TOPS) for perception, state estimation, and onboard inference.
The conversation also hits the gap between “embodied AI” expectations and what ships: autonomous navigation with visual-language models is moving fast, but getting product-level reliability still takes work. For now, Booster’s near-term targets are safer, smaller humanoids for classrooms and labs, with entry configurations discussed around the $6k range and roughly 1h20 of walking on a charge—enough to iterate on locomotion, perception, and early manipulation without claiming it will do laundry next year.
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