Bay Area Frontier Research Club #27 | Robotics & Embodied AI: Feel or Think? (dinner + paper discussion @ Mission Robotics)

About this event

The robotics crowd is back at Mission Robotics.

The Embodied AI track is a monthly research forum co-hosted with Mission Robotics, in their 8,500 sq ft brick-and-timber robotics facility in the heart of the Mission — a floor shared with more than a dozen robots.

This session is built around one question: what does a robot need before it acts — richer senses or better reasoning? Reasoning-enabled VLAs now think out loud before they move. Talk 1 asks whether that thinking can be monitored and steered at runtime, and shows the uncomfortable answer: fixing the reasoning made a driving policy markedly safer and did almost nothing for manipulation. Talk 2 comes from the touch and dexterity side — what contact-rich sensing and control buy when reasoning doesn’t. Expect the room to push on where reasoning earns its cost and where fast, contact-rich control wins.

The Frontier Research Club is a curated forum for rigorous, technical discussion at the frontier of AI. We convene researchers from the frontier labs, Stanford, Berkeley, and the teams building in production to examine concrete work — papers, methods, and results — with a bias toward assumptions, evaluation methodology, failure modes, and what would count as convincing evidence.

Presentations are intentionally brief so the majority of time is reserved for questions and critique. Materials are shared in advance so the conver...

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