Smiling Buddha is an open research initiative building the real-world data layer for physical AI.
The next decade of robotics and embodied AI will depend on shared data, shared benchmarks, and shared reproducibility standards. Web-scale pipelines built for LLMs don't transfer cleanly to physical intelligence. Smiling Buddha exists to build that missing infrastructure — openly, reproducibly, and with the broader physical-AI research community as the primary user.
Physical AI needs its own data infrastructure: real-deployment anchor data, shared benchmarks, and reproducibility standards designed for embodied intelligence in operational environments. Smiling Buddha aims to build that layer — openly, reproducibly, with the broader physical-AI research community as the primary user. Not a company. Not a platform. A public research substrate anyone can build on.
Every dataset ships with a schema, a validation score, and a reproducibility manifest. Every benchmark ships with data, protocol, reference code, and a public leaderboard — as a complete bundle only when the protocol has passed community review. Every paper ships with LaTeX source and the exact data used to produce every figure. Every decision that shapes the project goes through a public RFC. That's the deal.
Smiling Buddha is a community initiative founded by researchers with operational experience running physical-AI deployments at scale. Institutional contributors and individual contributors are named as founding partners and community members as they join. The initiative is not a commercial entity, does not sell datasets or benchmarks, and does not offer commercial services.
Named as they enroll. Every contribution credited. Apply →
Research collaboration, dataset contribution, or institutional partnership questions: [email protected]. Technical questions and bug reports will go through GitHub once v0.1 opens.
