Ropedia Launches Academic Program to Advance Physical AI Research

Singapore-based Physical AI startup Ropedia has launched its Academic Partner Program, giving selected universities and academic researchers access to its HOMIE Gen2 wearable data-capture platform.

The program is designed to help researchers collect real-world data for research in robotics, embodied AI, human robot interaction and other Physical AI applications.

Ropedia's HOMIE Gen2 Platform

HOMIE Gen2 is a head-mounted device designed to capture synchronized multimodal data from real-world environments. It can record video, motion, depth, spatial and inertial signals as people move interact with objects and navigate physical spaces.

The collected data can be processed through researchers' own pipelines or Ropedia's data processing system. It can then support the development of World Models and Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models.

According to Ropedia, Physical AI requires data that captures real human activity and interactions in physical environments, rather than relying only on text-based datasets.

Academic Research Network

Ropedia said its academic collaboration network includes researchers and institutions such as Princeton University, Carnegie Mellon University, the University of California San Diego the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Westlake University and Allen Institute for AI.

Nanyang Technological University (NTU), where Ropedia's core technology originated, was also among the early institutions to test HOMIE. Researchers at NTU continue to use the device for research.

Ropedia also said its Xperience-10M dataset has been downloaded more than 2.3 million times and supports research in egocentric understanding and embodied AI.

Ropedia Expands Physical AI Data Infrastructure

The Academic Partner Program is part of Ropedia's broader effort to build data infrastructure for Physical AI. The company's approach covers real-world data capture, processing, annotation and the development of model-ready datasets.

As part of its expansion, Ropedia is also launching a 500-hour Physical AI evaluation program, providing real-world data for evaluation and research.

Ropedia is also increasing its focus on the US market and is participating in IROS 2026 in Pittsburgh from September 28 to 30.

About Ropedia

Founded in Singapore in the second half of 2025 by Zhaoxi Chen, Fangzhou Hong, and Ziwei Liu, Ropedia is a Physical AI startup focused on building data infrastructure for robotics and embodied AI.

The company develops the HOMIE data-capture device and multimodal datasets such as Xperience-10M. Ropedia is headquartered in Singapore and has an additional office in Mountain View, California.

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