Bay Area Frontier Research Club #31 | Intelligence Meets Matter: Imitation, Curiosity & Touch (dinner + paper discussion @ Mission Robotics)

About this event

The robotics research crowd is back at Mission Robotics.

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

Most robot learning today starts from human demonstrations: collect enough examples and train a policy to imitate them. Talk 1 comes from the builder's seat — robot imitation learning broadly, and how policies grow out of what New Theory has built. Talk 2 comes from a different direction: a robot that gets curious about what it feels. With no task rewards and no demonstrations during exploration, it learns to grasp and manipulate objects, and the touch data it collects then improves VLA models that were pre-trained without any touch. Expect the room to push on what each approach buys, and where it breaks.

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 share...

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