Eastworlds Labs Partners with Geological Dome to Put First Humanoid Robot, Pemba, at Closest Point to the Sun on Earth

Eastworlds Labs is Exclusive Provider of Unitree G1 Robot that Made Historic Journey to Mount Chimborazo (Ecuador), the Farthest Point from Earth's Center

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia, June 14, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Eastworlds Labs, the AI robotics initiative of Virtuals Protocol, today announced it is the exclusive provider of the Unitree G1 humanoid robot, named Pemba, for Geologic Dome's expedition that placed the first humanoid robot on Mount Chimborazo (Ecuador) at 20,312 feet on June 5, 2026. Chimborazo's summit is the farthest point from the Earth's center and the closest point to the Sun on Earth. The expedition marked a defining moment in the history of embodied AI and a milestone for Eastworlds Labs' mission to extend autonomous AI agents into the physical world.

The team documented the expedition and will create a trailer to help promote another trek up Mount Everest in the Fall this year with the robot, working with the production crew behind Netflix's global hit documentary, 14 Peaks: Nothing Is Impossible. The documentary debuted in Netflix's Global Top 10 with 12.17 million hours watched in its first week. 

The Unitree G1, supplied exclusively by Eastworlds Labs, was the only humanoid robot on the expedition. Weighing 35kg and capable of folding to 690mm for transport, the G1 was disassembled and carried by the team across camps before being reassembled at each step — a feat that pushes the boundaries of both robotics engineering and human-machine collaboration.

The Hardest Stress Test on Earth

Temperatures on Mt. Chimborazo can drop to -15°C with wind gusts reaching 90 km/h. To survive and operate in these conditions, the G1 has been outfitted with custom cold-weather jackets, gated enclosures, and composite feet. The robot's autonomy stack — trained in NVIDIA Isaac Sim at 1,620x real-time with 85% sim-to-real transfer on uneven terrain — has been pretrained specifically for wind turbulence response and balance recovery on technical alpine terrain.

Communications ran via a proprietary mesh relay across all camps, with satellite internet at each camp delivering 25ms latency — well within the 50ms threshold required for live teleoperation thanks to Reflex's new latency software. The expedition had daily behind-the-scenes content across TikTok, Instagram, and X.

Why This Matters for the Agent Economy

For Eastworlds Labs, the Chimborazo expedition led by Geologic Dome is more than a headline, it is a live proof point for its thesis: that humanoid robots, equipped with the right hardware, data infrastructure, and autonomy, can operate in environments no wheeled or fixed system can reach.

The expedition also extends Eastworlds Labs accelerator, first announced in February, which provides founders direct access to humanoid robot fleets, industrial-scale datasets, and the Agent Commerce Protocol (ACP) to deploy and scale AI robot systems in the real world.

Beyond the hardware milestone, the expedition carries a lasting commitment to the communities it touches. Eastworlds Labs sponsored the expedition and is contributing funding toward the nature conservation mission and initiatives led by Geologic Dome. In support of this mission, the Unitree G1 robot will be donated to the local Sherpa community for the Everest expedition, embedding the expedition's legacy directly into the region it will traverse.

Geologic Dome's mission is to build the autonomous infrastructure tech stack that conservation zones need to survive long-term. From communication relays and AI-powered ecological monitoring to energy-independent robotic platforms capable of operating where human presence is too costly, too dangerous, or too intermittent to sustain, Geologic Dome and Eastworlds Labs are committed to help local indigenous communities preserve their land, culture, and nature at-large.

The organization is currently validating this approach across three sites spanning equatorial forest in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the montane cloud forests in Ecuador, and the full Himalayan altitude gradient in Nepal.

"Conservation fails when it depends entirely on people being physically present in the most difficult places on Earth," said Pablo Berlanga Boemare, founder of Geologic Dome. "We're building the systems that make persistent monitoring and research possible without that constraint. Chimborazo, and eventually Mount Everest, is how we prove they work under some of the hardest conditions the planet can throw at them."

About Geologic Dome

Geologic Dome is the team behind Robot Everest, led by Pablo Berlanga Boemare (CEO, ex-Microsoft/WWF/Max Planck) and Titania Freire (COO, Conservation Ops/UN). They help local indigenous communities gather the data necessary to preserve their land, culture and save nature by building robots to operate within complex ecosystems like rainforests, deserts and arctic tundras. They currently operate in Congo, the Amazon and Nepal.

About Eastworlds Labs

Eastworlds Labs is the robotics initiative under Virtuals Protocol, building the infrastructure to extend autonomous AI agents into the physical world. Through its accelerator program, Eastworlds Labs provides founders direct access to humanoid robot fleets, industrial-scale datasets, and the tools to deploy and scale AI robot systems in real-world environments. For more information, visit https://eastworlds.io/.

About Virtuals Protocol

Virtuals Protocol is the infrastructure layer for the AI agent economy. Anyone can create, tokenize, and launch AI agents that autonomously discover, transact, and earn onchain. The protocol includes agent creation and tokenization tools, a permissionless launchpad, an agent-to-agent commerce marketplace, and ERC-8183, the open payment standard co-authored with the Ethereum Foundation for trustless agent transactions. Beyond digital agents, Virtuals is extending into the physical world through robotics, bridging agent intelligence with real-world task execution. For more information, visit https://virtuals.io/.

SOURCE Virtuals.IO