Post-CoRL 2026: What's Next for Robot Learning? @Robotics Center

CoRL 2026 wraps in Austin on Nov 12. Less than 24 hours later, the conversation lands in San Francisco.
We're bringing CoRL 2026 paper authors back from Austin and putting them on one stage with the VCs who back robot learning. The people writing the papers and the people deciding which ones become companies, in the same room, the night after the conference ends.
Missed Austin? This is the fastest way to catch up on what mattered. Were you there? Come argue about it.
On stage · Panel 1: fresh from Austin
Yuxin Chen, UC Berkeley. Getting humanoids through cluttered real-world spaces with a single whole-body VLA. Co-author of a CoRL Spotlight on humanoid navigation, and first author of CLIFT, which turns Gemini Robotics On-Device into humanoid specialists
Yutong Bai, postdoc at UC Berkeley BAIR. What happens when robots learn through play? Co-author of the CoRL Spotlight Playful Agentic Robot Learning, plus T-Rex on tactile-reactive dexterous manipulation
Anuva Banwasi, Stanford Interactive Perception and Robot Learning Lab. Robots that get better by remembering what they've done. First author of MessyMem, learning-from-doing memory for mobile manipulation
James (Jingxi) Xu, postdoc at Stanford's Biomimetics and Dexterous Manipulation Lab. Wear it to teach it. Co-author of Universal Manipulation Exoskeleton, which teaches robots compliant whole-body skills with real-time torque feedback
Jonas Frey, postdoc at Stanford ASL and UC Berkeley BAIR. Navigation that holds up in the real world. Co-author of GLST, long-horizon memory for chained navigation goals, and EgoHTR, egocentric 4D data of humans crossing rough terrain
Ruihai Wu, postdoc at UC Berkeley with Masayoshi Tomizuka. Teaching robots the hard stuff: garments, furniture assembly and two-handed tasks. Co-author of BiRoAD on bimanual manipulation at CoRL, and of Bi-Adapt, an ICRA 2026 Best Paper Finalist
Panel 2: inside the frontier labs
Researchers from the labs building robot foundation models and world models, on where generalist robots are really headed
Ziqi Pang, Member of Technical Staff at Amazon FAR (Frontier AI & Robotics), building robotics models. More frontier lab speakers dropping this week
Plus VCs investing in robotics and physical AI in the room. Spots are limited and we review every application, so register early
What we'll get into
The papers everyone was talking about in the hallways, and which ones will still matter outside the lab
World models as policies: a real shift, or this year's buzzword?
Generalist robot policies meet real-world RL
What VCs want to see before a research project becomes a company, and where they're placing bets next
Who's in the room
Robotics researchers, founders, engineers and investors from across the Bay Area. If you're building, funding or deploying robots, this is your crowd. Come early, stay late, and meet the people you've been citing.
Schedule
6:00 PM · Doors open and networking6:30 PM · Panel 1: CoRL 2026 authors, fresh from Austin7:00 PM · Panel 2: inside the frontier labs7:45 PM · Audience Q&A, then networking, drinks and bites9:00 PM · Wrap
Good to know
Registration requires approval. Spots are limited and we review every application
Venue: Robotics Center of Silicon Valley, 90 Welsh St in SoMa, a working robot lab with arms, hands and humanoids on the floor
About Embodied Collective
A community for people building the future of physical AI in San Francisco. We host panels, dinners and demos, and send The Physical AI Brief every week.
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LinkedIn: linkedin.com/company/embodied-collective
X: @EmbodiedCoX
Luma (all events and the weekly brief): luma.com/embodiedcollective
Website: embodiedcollective.org

About Robotics Center
Robotics Center of Silicon Valley is the hardware, data and evaluation partner for teams building physical AI. From our lab at 90 Welsh St in San Francisco, we supply and integrate robot arms, dexterous hands, humanoids, quadrupeds and egocentric capture rigs from leading manufacturers, run teleoperation data collection, and benchmark frontier robot models on real hardware through our open-source XEbench and independent model evaluations. Hundreds of labs, startups and enterprise teams, from Apple and Meta to YC founders and university groups, come to us to get robots running, collect data and find out what their models can actually do in the physical world. Robotics Center is a Y Combinator S25 company backed by NVIDIA Inception.
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