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

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 shared in advance so the conversation starts at depth.

Agenda

5:30pm: Doors open5:30pm – 6:30pm: Networking + light dinner6:30pm – 8:00pm: Research presentations + discussion8:00pm – 8:30pm: Networking

Presenters & topics

Talk 1 – David Knigge, New Theory (Member of Technical Staff)

Talk 2 — Alex Proshkin, UC Berkeley (Pieter Abbeel's lab)

Tactile Curiosity: letting touch decide where a robot explores

What happens when a robot explores driven only by curiosity about what it feels? With no task rewards and no demonstrations during exploration, the robot learns to grasp and manipulate objects on its own, and the tactile data it gathers then improves VLA models that were pre-trained without any touch. The question for the room: what touch-driven exploration finds that human demonstrations never show, and what it costs.

Pre-read: Tactile Curiosity Drives Robot Interaction — Proshkin, Sferrazza et al., Berkeley/ETH, with Abbeel and Krause (arXiv, Sept 2026).

Want to present your work?

If you have a research paper you'd like to discuss at one of our next sessions, please submit it for consideration.

Submit your paper here!

Who should attend

Robotics researchers and research engineers

People training or deploying policies on real hardware — manipulation, humanoids, VLA, sim-to-real, world models

People building imitation learning pipelines — teleoperation, demonstration data, behavior cloning, and the policies trained on them

Anyone working on exploration, intrinsic motivation, or reinforcement learning for manipulation

Researchers working on tactile sensing and contact-rich control

Founders and engineers building tooling for robot data, simulation, and evaluation

Capacity is limited.

We will take photos and short video clips for event recap and promotion. By attending, you consent to being photographed and recorded, and to the use of those images and clips by the organizers on social media and other event marketing channels.

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Email: [email protected]

Hosted by

Frontier Syndicate is a venture community connecting frontier tech researchers, builders, and investors through curated convenings and early-stage capital. Across the Bay Area, we host a recurring series of research forums, builder nights, and intimate investor dinners — and back exceptional companies emerging from the labs, communities, and technical networks we convene.

Mission Robotics is 8,500 square feet in the heart of the Mission — a converted brick-and-timber factory, hardwired for hardware, where founders at the frontier of embodied AI build alongside more than a dozen robots. Home to humanoids, robot arms, a shared data-collection rig, and a frontier world model on tap, it's purpose-built for the people teaching machines to act in the physical world.