“Soft robots locomote by reshaping compliant bodies. However, precision control of large, reversible 3-D deformations with minimal hardware remains difficult. We tackle this by treating morphing as a geometric problem: prescribing an in-plane “metric actuation” field—coordinated local area expansions and contractions—changes a surface’s intrinsic curvature, causing a flat surface to autonomously adopt a prescribed 3-D form.”

The seminar is open to Stanford faculty, students, and sponsors.

Panel discussion on how robotics ventures bridge the gap from simulation prototypes to scalable production and tackle the Go-to-market challenges.

Mark Mueller of UC Berkeley presents a seminar entitlted “Hardware / controls co-design to overcome challenges for aerial robots.” This seminar is open to Stanford faculty, students, and sponsors.

Russ Tedrake of MIT gives a talk entitled “A Careful Examination of Multitask Transfer in TRI’s Large Behavior Models for Dexterous Manipulation”

Dhruv Shah, senior research scientist at Google DeepMind and incoming assistant professor at Princeton University, gives a talk on generalist robot policies.

Sam Burden, associate professor at UW gives a talk on human-machine interaction games.

Prof. Jonathan Hurst, co-founder of Agility Robotics, gives a talk “Humanoids: From The Warehouse To Your House” and a robotics demo of Digit. Registration required.

Lining Yao gives a seminar entitled “Embodied Intelligence with Morphing Materials and Mechanisms”

We are thrilled to welcome Marc Pollefeys for an engaging talk on Spatial AI to Assist Humans and Enable Robots

Franziska Meier presents examples of FAIR robotics research towards the goal of learning general representations for a wide spectrum of robotics applications.

Seminar with Anushri Dixit, an Assistant Professor in Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) with research interests in safety-critical planning & control, robotics, and stochastic optimization.

Join us for an insightful seminar by Dr. Michelle J. Johnson, Associate Professor of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation at the Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania. A leading expert in rehabilitation robotics, Dr. Johnson will present her talk, "Affordable Robots for Rehabilitation after Brain Injury Worldwide: Current Efforts and Barriers."

Join us for an engaging seminar by Professor Sebastian Trimpe on leveraging learning for control in robotics and physical machines, where he will explore deep reinforcement learning, imitation learning, and Bayesian optimization to enhance control strategies.

Seminar with Sangbae Kim

Join us for a seminar with Mark R. Cutkosky, Fletcher Jones Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Stanford University. He will discuss ReachBot, a robotic system developed with NASA for mobility in challenging environments like Martian caves. ReachBot uses extendable booms for long-reach movement and secure grasping, requiring a motion planning approach similar to multi-fingered grasping. Mark will outline its design, recent field tests in the Mojave Desert, and potential future applications, including integration with mobile platforms like ANYmal.

Join us for an exciting seminar with Robert Katzschmann, Assistant Professor of Robotics at ETH Zurich and founder of the Soft Robotics Lab. Discover how living robots, integrating biological cells and synthetic materials, are transforming the landscape of robotics with capabilities like growth, regeneration, and environmental adaptation. Robert will delve into recent breakthroughs in electrohydraulic musculoskeletal robotics, vision-controlled inkjet printing, and xolographic biofabrication.

Join speaker Daniele Gammelli as they explore how advancements in foundation models are shaping the future of space autonomy. The talk will cover adapting foundation model techniques, like Transformers, for reliable decision-making in spacecraft trajectory optimization. Additionally, Daniele will highlight opportunities for pre-trained models in machine learning-based autonomy stacks, from data curation to modular reasoning, paving the way for a versatile Space Foundation Model.

Join speaker Yifan Hou as they explore compliance in robotic manipulation—how the elastic relationship between force and motion enhances robustness. Yifan will present two methods: one using analytical modeling to compute optimal control and motion plans, and another introducing Adaptive Compliance Policy (ACP), a framework that learns dynamic compliance adjustments from human demonstrations.