Booster K1: A Pocket-Sized Humanoid

What if you could hold a world-champion humanoid robot in your hands?

The Booster K1 stands just 95 centimeters tall and weighs 19.5 kilograms. It fits inside a carry-on suitcase, and in July 2025, it powered both the first and second-place teams in the RoboCup KidSize Humanoid League, one of the most demanding proving grounds in all of robotics.

We’re not talking about a toy. It's a fully autonomous, AI-native humanoid platform with onboard intelligence, real-time perception, and enough computing power to run advanced AI models without ever pinging the cloud. It walks, balances on uneven terrain, plays competitive soccer, dances traditional Emirati routines, and performs lion dances at live events across Dubai, Abu Dhabi, and CES 2026.

And XMAQUINA is giving one away.

Before we get to that, let's break down what makes the K1 one of the most compelling humanoid platforms on the market today.

Built to Move with 22 Degrees of Freedom

The K1 packs 22 independently controlled joints: six per leg, four per arm, and two in the head. Each joint runs on force-controlled actuators with dual encoders, managing torque, velocity, and position simultaneously. The knee joint alone delivers up to 60 N·m of peak torque. That's serious mechanical output for a robot that weighs less than a medium-sized dog.

In practical terms, this means the K1 not only walks, but runs. It recovers from pushes, it balances on uneven surfaces. It executes complex choreography requiring precise coordination, real-time balance adjustments, and fluid transitions between movements.

At Abu Dhabi's Autonomous Week, the K1 performed the traditional Emirati Ayyalah dance (rhythmic swaying, coordinated gestures, and expressive timing) alongside human performers. This wasn't a stiff pre-programmed loop. The robot demonstrated fluid upper-body control and weight-shifting precision that had the crowd pulling out their phones.

Shortly after, it was spotted walking through crowds at the Formula 1 race weekend in Dubai, greeting visitors, posing for photos, and navigating dense environments with calm, stable movement.

The Brain: Up to 200 TOPS of Onboard AI

Under the shell, the K1 is running real intelligence. Booster offers three computing tiers, each built on the same physical platform but scaled for different levels of AI workload.

Even the entry-level Geek model delivers 48 trillion operations per second, enough to run perception and control algorithms entirely on the robot. The Professional tier pushes to 200 TOPS, putting it in territory where you can run sophisticated vision transformers, reinforcement learning policies, and large-scale inference, all locally, with zero cloud dependency.

This matters. A robot that processes everything onboard isn't waiting on latency from a server farm. Every decision, every balance correction, every obstacle detected, it happens in real time, on the machine itself.

How the K1 Sees and Hears

The K1's sensor array is built for real-world interaction. 

It includes a Stereo Depth Camera, and a 3D spatial awareness for navigation, obstacle avoidance, and object recognition. The K1 understands its environment in three dimensions, not just flat images.

• 9-Axis IMU: Tracks acceleration, orientation, and angular velocity across all axes. This is the core of the K1's balance system. It's why the robot can recover from unexpected pushes and maintain stability on uneven ground.
• Circular 6-Microphone Array + Speaker: Sound localization and voice interaction. The K1 can detect where sound is coming from, process voice commands, and respond through its onboard speaker.
• Connectivity: WiFi 6, Bluetooth 5.2, and Gigabit Ethernet expansion. Whether you're streaming data to a workstation, controlling it from your phone, or running it as a standalone autonomous system, the connectivity stack covers it.

The K1 Spec Sheet

For those who want the numbers:

Champion Pedigree

Let's talk about what this robot has actually done in the field.

RoboCup 2025, Brazil. The K1 powered both the champion and runner-up teams in the KidSize Humanoid League. Germany's HTWK team took first place; Tsinghua University's TH-MOS team took second. Both ran on K1 hardware. In a competition that demands real-time autonomous decision-making, rapid movement, and full self-recovery (not teleoperated demo runs), the K1 proved it can perform under pressure.

2025 World Humanoid Robotics Games Federation. The K1 served as Center Stage Lead Performer, demonstrating that the platform isn't limited to competition environments. It can handle entertainment, public engagement, and live performance scenarios with equal reliability.

During CES 2026, Las Vegas, Booster brought the K1 to the show floor at Booth 8262, where every unit on display was available for on-site reservation. They sold out.

UAE Tour, Abu Dhabi & Dubai. Public performances at Autonomous Week and the F1 race weekend demonstrated the K1's readiness for real-world, uncontrolled environments with crowds, noise, and unpredictable conditions.

What Can You Actually Do With a K1?

The K1 is purpose-built as an embodied AI development platform, but its use cases extend well beyond the lab:

• Robotics Research & Development: With ROS2 support, open SDK, Python and C++ compatibility, Isaac Sim and MuJoCo simulation integration, and the open-source Booster Gym 2.0 reinforcement learning framework, the K1 is a complete development ecosystem. Researchers can train locomotion policies in simulation and deploy them directly to hardware with zero-shot sim-to-real transfer.

• Education & STEM: Booster has already shipped over 700 units to more than 200 clients across 20+ countries and 70 universities. The K1 is designed for the teach-learn-practice-compete-apply cycle. It's a hands-on tool for the next generation of roboticists.

• Competition: Proven at the highest level. RoboCup champion hardware, battle-tested through 30 hours of continuous 500 N impact testing and 100+ hours of real-world operation.

• Entertainment & Events: Dancing, performing, engaging crowds. The K1's combination of fluid movement, compact size, and autonomous navigation makes it a natural fit for live events, exhibitions, and public demonstrations.

• Embodied AI Agents: With built-in LLM integration (Doubao LLM, 6 months free), the K1 can serve as a physical AI agent, processing natural language, perceiving its environment, and taking autonomous action. 

• Personal Robotics Exploration: At under 20 kg with a carry-on suitcase form factor, the K1 is one of the few humanoid platforms accessible enough for individual enthusiasts, makers, and hobbyists to own, program, and experiment with at home.

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The Company Behind the Machine

Booster Robotics was founded in 2023 by Cheng Hao, a Tsinghua University graduate, alongside a core team from Tsinghua's Robot Control Lab and the Hephaestus RoboCup Team. The group brings over 20 years of accumulated expertise in humanoid robotics.

Since then, Booster has closed a Pre-A round backed by CMBC International and Zhongguancun Science City, a Series A led by Shenzhen Capital Group, and a Series A+ led by the Beijing Robotics Industry Development Investment Fund. The company is headquartered in Beijing, was selected for Forbes China's AI Tech TOP 50 (the only embodied intelligence company from Beijing on the list), and became an official RoboCup Federation partner.

In less than three years, Booster has shipped 700+ units across 20+ countries, swept RoboCup's KidSize and AdultSize leagues (with the larger T1 platform), and had its T1 robot personally signed by Jensen Huang at NVIDIA's Spring Festival. It was the only humanoid invited.

This is a company shipping real robots to real customers, winning real competitions, and scaling globally.

The First Humanoid Airdrop

XMAQUINA is giving away a Booster K1 humanoid robot to the community.

Entries are earned through activity across XMAQUINA, including staking DEUS, minting Humanoid Cards, providing liquidity, and completing contributor tasks. Each action generates XP, and XP converts into entries for this draw. The more you contribute, the more entries you accumulate.

This giveaway is tied to a DAO milestone. The Booster K1 will be awarded once the community reaches 30,000,000 DEUS staked. Progress toward this milestone is tracked transparently in the Contributor Hub, where participants can see how close the system is to execution.

Each entry represents a weighted chance of winning. Once the milestone is reached, the draw is conducted and a winner is selected based on accumulated entries.

The K1 is not a symbolic reward. It is a fully capable humanoid platform used in world-class robotics competitions, research environments, and real-world deployments. Access to systems like this has historically been limited to institutions and specialized teams. This model changes that by aligning ownership with contribution.

Connect your wallet, start contributing, and earn entries.

"The K1 represents something super significant. A championship-proven humanoid platform compact enough to carry on a plane, yet powerful enough to run sophisticated AI entirely onboard. What Booster has accomplished in under three years reflects the pace at which the entire humanoid robotics field is accelerating. The robots are here, they're proven, and they're only getting started." 

— Jessica Alvarez, Founding Member, XMAQUINA

"Booster K1 is compact yet powerful, an electrifying companion for play and exploration, and a fully programmable platform unlocking endless possibilities in research and education."

— Eren Chen, GTM, Booster Robotics

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