The state of open-source robotics hardware

A census of 2,445 open robotics projects, taken from the RoboPartPicker catalog on 2026-10-07. Every figure below is a count over our database. Nothing is estimated, sampled, or extrapolated, and the queries are published with the data so the numbers can be checked.

The headline: bills of materials are mostly empty

2,185 of 2,408 bills of materials (90.7%) contain no line items at all. A project can publish a repository, a README and a licence and still tell a builder nothing about what to buy. Only a small minority of projects carry a bill of materials whose lines resolve to a specific, identifiable part, which is the form a builder can actually order from.

This matters because a BOM is the difference between a project that reads as interesting and a project someone can reproduce. For most of the catalog, the shopping list is left as an exercise.

Licensing is often ambiguous

345 of 2,445 projects (14.1%) declare no licence at all, and 673 declare one that GitHub cannot identify as a known licence. Together that is 1,018 projects (41.6%) whose terms a builder cannot rely on without asking the maintainer first. For anyone planning to build on a design commercially, that ambiguity is the first thing to resolve, and it is usually invisible from the project page.

NOASSERTION 673MIT 523not declared 345Apache-2.0 325BSD-3-Clause 185GPL-3.0 133mit 67BSD-2-Clause 43

What kinds of robots these are

Manipulators and humanoids dominate the catalog by count. Mobile bases, quadrupeds and aerial platforms follow. A large group resists classification entirely, which is its own finding about how projects describe themselves.

other 975manipulator 429humanoid 286aerial 207mobile 174quadruped 115hexapod 68gripper 61actuator 45underwater 35biped 33exoskeleton 17

The component side is where the data is dense

Against 2,445 projects, the catalog holds 34,760 distinct components described by 60,458 specification rows across 98 distinct spec dimensions, covering 33,344 components. Specification coverage is the part of the open-hardware ecosystem that is well documented; sourcing and assembly are the parts that are not.

Method

Projects counted are published, public, non-demo rows. Component and specification counts come from the component tables. BOM emptiness is measured as bills of materials with no line items attached to any version. Figures were computed on 2026-10-07 and move as the catalog grows, so the numbers above are a snapshot rather than a fixed claim.

Check it yourself

The same data is available programmatically and the catalog is browsable without an account: every project, the component catalog, the public API and MCP server, and the sourcing questions we answer.