Introducing RTP: How AI Agents Will Hire Robots With a Single HTTP Request

There are over 4 million industrial robots operating worldwide. Millions more drones, 3D printers, smart locks, and IoT devices. Every single one of them speaks a different language. An AI agent can browse the web, write code, call APIs, and pay for cloud compute — all autonomously. But ask it to hire a robot to pick an item off a shelf? There's no standard way to do that. Until now. What is RTP? RTP (Robot Task Protocol) is an open standard that defines a common language for AI agents to discover, commission, and pay for physical robot tasks over the internet. It sits on top of x402 — the HTTP-native payment protocol from Coinbase and Cloudflare — and extends it into the physical world. An agent pays USDC via a standard HTTP request. A robot executes a task. Escrow handles the rest. No accounts. No API keys. No vendor SDKs. Just HTTP + payment + task. The Core Idea: Robots as Payable Endpoints Every x402 service works the same way: you make an HTTP request, get a 402 Payment Required