Free Humanoid Corpus
A public-domain prior art commons covering robots, humanoids, and humanoid-adjacent entities from private companies, open source repositories, science fiction, and academia.
Browse the corpus Cross-cuts GitHub
The corpus IS the prior art commons. Every entry, at the moment of timestamped commit and quarterly release, is a defensive publication. There is no separate commons layer above this catalog — the structured data here, combined with the cryptographic timestamping in releases/, is itself the invalidity-contention material.
What it covers
| Corpus | Count | Role |
|---|---|---|
| Private | 57 | Patent-thicket holders. Reference points for what’s been claimed. |
| Academic | 27 | Peer-reviewed disclosures. Already prior art automatically. |
| Fictional | 11 | Science fiction. Cited successfully as 102 prior art when specific. |
| Open | 11 | Existing open hardware. Already public-domain or permissive. |
| Total | 106 | (77 commons-grade, 29 draft) |
Entries span 1920 (Karel Čapek’s R.U.R.) through 2025.
The 48 cross-cuts are the working tool
Each subsystem cross-cut is a chronologically-ordered list of every disclosing entry, with prior_art_notes and disclosure_citation ready to drop into an invalidity contention.
| Cross-cut | Earliest | Entries |
|---|---|---|
| Bipedal locomotion | 1956 | 57 |
| Anthropomorphic hand | 1973 | 42 |
| Direct-drive electric actuator | 1987 | 44 |
| Harmonic-drive electric actuator | 1986 | 14 |
| ZMP balancing | 1996 | 13 |
| RL policy | 2016 | 30 |
| VLA (vision-language-action) | 2023 | 9 |
| Safety hard-constraint supervisor | 1940 | 11 |
Provenance
Quarterly releases carry three independent cryptographic timestamps attesting pre-existence:
- FreeTSA (RFC 3161)
- DigiCert (RFC 3161)
- OpenTimestamps (Bitcoin-anchored)
The current release tarball, corpus-2026.Q2.tar.gz (SHA-256 aa9430c6e785a409e3dbb10042b16e0e5677752c85eeffcba2c6b5605cde27ce), is anchored to Bitcoin blocks 948142, 948151, and 948161.
→ Release runbook · Timestamping ceremony
Use it from the command line
git clone https://github.com/openIE-dev/free-humanoid-corpus.git
cd free-humanoid-corpus
# Validate the corpus and your local edits
python3 tools/validate.py corpus.jsonl --strict
# Look up prior art for a patent-claim phrase
python3 tools/lookup.py "harmonic drive reducer with output torque sensor"
# Scaffold a new entry interactively (then submit as a PR)
python3 tools/new_entry.py
License
CC0 1.0. Public domain dedication. The corpus exists to be cited, copied, indexed, mirrored, embedded, ingested, and built upon. No usage license required.