Train the walk before the robot arrives
Locomotion training in simulation for one humanoid, with a license you can read and a price only if the order page prints one.
- Category
- Hardware
- Who it is for
- A robotics developer who will train in simulation before ordering hardware.
- Possible model
- Open source
- Difficulty
- Hard
- Inspired by
- Cyclotron · Menlo Research
- Original launch
- Watch the launch · Oct 7, 2026
Difficulty is an editorial estimate of technical and operational complexity, not a score.
Startup idea analysis by Startup Ideas. Last reviewed Oct 7, 2026. How we read a launch.
The startup idea
Asimov's account posted that you can start training a humanoid before you own one. The link is github.com/menloresearch/cyclotron. The readme says Asimov 1 is an open-source humanoid from Menlo Research, and this repo is the training and evaluation code for its locomotion, so you can train in simulation and deploy to the real robot. It is an Isaac Lab extension, PPO and adversarial motion priors. The install expects Ubuntu, an NVIDIA driver, and uv, and it downloads Isaac Sim. The license is BSD-3-Clause, copyright Menlo Research and the Isaac Lab developers. The readme links menlo.ai/order. This page did not find a price there from the repo text, and it did not run the training.
The opportunity is the policy you can train before the hardware shows up, not a robot you ship in a week. A smaller product is one body, a sim, a walk you can watch, and an order page that either prints a price or says it does not. If the only way to learn is to buy the robot first, you do not have the thing the post is selling.
Do not invent the robot's price. Do not say a sim walk is the robot walking. The readme shows both, and they are not the same step. Do not drop the NVIDIA and Ubuntu requirements.
The problem
The walking policy is locked to a lab that owns the robot. Everyone else starts from a paper.
Who would pay for this?
- Primary
- A robotics developer who will train in simulation before ordering hardware.
- Secondary
- A lab that already has Isaac and wants a body with a published reward, not a paper.
- Early adopter
- One policy in sim, watched, on a machine that meets the install.
How could it make money?
Possible models. Nothing here is a claim about what Menlo Research charges.
- The post does not print a price. Do not invent one.
- BSD-3 is the license on the training code. The robot is a separate order.
- Isaac Sim is not free of its own terms. Say the dependency.
What would the MVP look like?
- One robot model.
- Training in simulation.
- A walk you can watch.
- The install's real requirements.
- An order link that does not pretend to be a price.
How to validate the idea
- Ask five robotics developers if they will clone it before they buy a robot.
- If the install is the wall, the policy was not the hard part.
- Do not add a second gait until one sim walk is watched by someone who is not you.
How to differentiate
- Train before you own it.
- The body is named, Asimov 1, not a generic humanoid.
- Sim and the real robot are both in the picture, and they are labeled.
- Do not become a robot store unless the price is on the page.
Why this could be interesting now
The post puts the training code in public and says you do not need the robot yet. The opening is one walk in sim, and no invented price.
Original product launch
This launch is inspiration and evidence that someone shipped, not a partnership. The idea above is our reading of the broader opportunity. Menlo Research did not write it.
- Product
- Cyclotron
- Company
- Menlo Research
- Film
- Cyclotron, train the walk before you own the robot
- Posted
- Oct 7, 2026 · 0:44
Product that inspired this idea
Menlo's post says you can train a humanoid before you own one. The repo is locomotion training for Asimov 1, BSD-3, and it links an order page. This page did not find a price, and did not run the sim.
Posted by @asimovinc. Watch the original launch. No separate product site is listed unless the post itself is the source.
- robot
- simulation
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