Ropedia Launches Academic Partner Program to Advance the Data Infrastructure Behind Physical AI

New program gives academic researchers access to HOMIE Gen2, while Ropedia launches a 500-hour Physical AI evaluation program as it expands its focus.

SINGAPORE, SINGAPORE, September 28, 2026 /EINPresswire.com/ -- Ropedia, a Physical AI startup building data infrastructure for robotics and embodied AI, today announced the launch of its Academic Partner Program, giving selected academic researchers and institutions access to its HOMIE Gen2 real-world data capture platform to advance research in robotics, embodied intelligence, and human-robot interaction.

As Physical AI systems move from controlled research environments toward increasingly complex real-world applications, researchers need access to data that captures not only what people see, but how they move, interact with objects, and navigate physical environments. Ropedia's Academic Partner Program is designed to support this research by making real-world multimodal data capture more accessible to academic teams.

Through the programme, researchers get access to HOMIE Gen2, Ropedia’s head-mounted multimodal capture device, which enables them to collect richer, higher-quality data through improved camera quality and enhanced data capture capabilities. The resulting data can then be processed using researchers’ own pipelines or Ropedia’s data processing pipeline, and used to support the development of applications such as World Models and Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models.

Ropedia's Xperience-10M dataset has been downloaded more than 2.3 million times, supporting research in egocentric understanding and embodied AI. Ropedia's academic collaboration network includes researchers and institutions across the United States, Asia, and other research hubs, including Princeton University, Carnegie Mellon University, the University of California San Diego, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Westlake University, Allen Institute for AI, and Advanced Machine Intelligence.

“Innovation always starts with research. Through the Academic Partner Program, we want to collaborate with research labs and universities to advance the field of Physical and Embodied AI,” said Zhaoxi Chen, Co-Founder and CEO of Ropedia. “By combining research from academia and resources from the industry, we aim to make data capture more accessible and affordable and build the next generation of physical intelligence.”

Expanding Access to Real-World Physical AI Data
HOMIE Gen2 captures synchronized multimodal information from real-world environments, including visual, motion, spatial, inertial, and semantic data. The platform enables researchers to study human behavior and human-object interactions and generate data for downstream Physical AI research.

The Academic Partner Program builds on Ropedia's broader work to develop an end-to-end data infrastructure for Physical AI spanning real-world capture, data processing, annotation, and model-ready datasets.

“We believe advancing the industry is a shared responsibility and not something any one company can do alone. Making Xperience-10M open source is part of that commitment, giving researchers and developers access to the data they need to push the boundaries of what is possible and helping the entire field move forward faster,” added Chen.

As Ropedia increases its focus on the U.S. market, the company will also participate in IROS 2026 in Pittsburgh from September 28–30, at booth 742. Concurrently, the startup is also launching its Ropedia Evaluation Program, offering 500 hours of real-world Physical AI data. At the same time, Ropedia is launching its Ropedia Evaluation Program, providing 500 hours of real-world Physical AI data.

Ropedia is headquartered in Singapore and has an additional office in Mountain View, California.

Researchers and academic institutions interested in participating can learn more about the program and apply for a HOMIE Gen2 Research Kit at ropedia.com/collaboration.

About Ropedia
Ropedia builds data infrastructure for physical AI. Its HOMIE capture device and structured multimodal datasets, including Xperience-10M, give robotics and embodied AI systems structured records of real human experience for training and simulation. Founded in Singapore in the second half of 2025 by Zhaoxi Chen, Fangzhou Hong and Ziwei Liu, Ropedia is headquartered in Singapore with an additional office in Mountain View, California.

Ropedia serves more than 20 leading global robotics and foundation model companies.

Carla Higham
Deene Strategic Partners
+1 323-614-1438
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