GPT-6 Astra Robotics Hardware Hackathon: Saturday Robotics × Robotics Center. SF

One day. Real robots. Frontier models.

Frontier models can plan, write code and drive a computer. The open question is what happens when one has to close a gripper on a real object.

For one full day — morning to night — Saturday Robotics and Robotics Center of Silicon Valley are putting frontier models on real hardware at Robotics Center's SF lab. No simulators: humanoids, arms, a quadruped, dexterous hands and teleop gloves on the floor, with mentors from the Bay Area robotics community all day.

Location

San Francisco

Date

TBD

🍽️ Food & Beverages

Not pizza 🍕 — but delicious authentic Chinese dim sum 🥘🍣🍱🥟🍤🍙🍘, plus plenty of great food throughout the day. You definitely won’t go hungry! 😋

🌱 Vegan options available🍓 Unlimited strawberries🧋 Afternoon boba & fruit tea 🍹🍛 Dinner: a delicious fusion mix of favorites 🍮🍝🍗🫛

Come for the robotics, stay for the food. 🤖🍴

On the floor (provided by Robotics Center)

  • M1 Mobile Manipulator — dual-arm mobile manipulator

  • Unitree G1 — humanoid

  • Unitree Go2 — quadruped

  • OpenArm — robotic arm

  • Wuji Hand 2 — dexterous hand

  • Wuji Glove — teleoperation glove

  • plus Aloha leader arms, tactile sensor kits, cameras and spare parts

Who it's for

Researchers, founders, engineers and students working on robot learning, VLA policies, world models, teleoperation and data collection. Bring a team of 1–4, or come solo and we'll match you in the morning.

Format (tentative — final schedule with the date)

  • 9:00 · Check-in, hardware briefing, team forming

  • 10:00 · Build starts — mentors on the floor

  • 13:00 · Lunch + lightning talks

  • 18:00 · Dinner

  • 20:00 · Demos in front of judges

  • 21:00 · Awards and wrap

Tracks & prizes — announced with the final date. Expect tracks around dexterous manipulation, teleoperation & data, and whole-body control.

What to bring — a laptop, your own API keys if you have them, and anything you want to mount on a robot. All robots stay on site.

Hosts

Saturday Robotics — Robotics Research Forum: a 3,000+ member Silicon Valley forum running a weekly robotics & world-models reading group, with researchers and founders from Google DeepMind, NVIDIA, Physical Intelligence, Generalist, Sunday, OpenAI, Meta FAIR, Tesla, Figure, Skild AI, Stanford, Berkeley, CMU, MIT, Bay Area top robotics startups and top VCs.

Robotics Center of Silicon Valley: a San Francisco robotics infrastructure hub — hardware, data collection, fleet teleoperation and education for research and industry teams — with a showroom and lab at 90 Welsh St.

Sponsors & partners

We're raising sponsorship for prizes, compute and operations, and every tier is open.

Who we're talking to: OpenAI — the GPT-6 Astra team, partnerships & community, and OpenAI Startups — plus frontier labs, cloud and inference providers, robotics companies, and funds backing physical AI. Warm intros are as welcome as cheques.

Title Partner — $50,000"Presented by" naming and logo lockup across the poster, event page, stage and recap · opening remarks · judge seat · dedicated demo bay · hiring booth · 10 guest passes

Gold — $20,000Logo on poster, event page and stage loop · 20-minute tech talk or workshop · judge seat · demo table · 6 guest passes · recruiting access

Silver — $10,000Logo on poster and event page · mentor slot during the build · recruiting table · 4 guest passes

Prize Track — $5,000 (per award)Name and present an award (e.g. "Best Dexterous Manipulation") · judge seat · logo beside that track · 2 guest passes

In-kindGPU hours, inference or API credits, model access, cloud infrastructure, sensors and spare parts, travel stipends for teams, or food and coffee for the floor — each recognised at the cash tier matching fair value. What moves the needle most is compute credits and cash; the robots themselves are already covered by Robotics Center.

Where sponsorship goes: prize pool and per-track bounties · compute and API credits handed to teams during the build · meals and coffee for the full day · hardware consumables and teleop rigs · recap video and technical write-ups.

Talk to us: [email protected] (Junfan Zhu) · [email protected] (Aurora Feng) · [email protected] (Jerry Huang, Robotics Center)

Join us

Saturday Robotics WhatsApp:

https://chat.whatsapp.com/HYxhjyaBbBuFZUlrV0AIaV?s=cl&p=i&mlu=0&ilr=4

Join Discord Community

Join Discord Server

Follow Saturday Robotics

/saturdayrobotic

Follow YouTube

/saturdayrobotic

Subscribe to Luma Calendar

https://luma.com/saturdayrobotic

Applications

Registration is approval-based. Tell us what you'd build and which hardware you want — capacity is limited by the number of robots in the room.

Community-run event. Not affiliated with, sponsored by, or endorsed by OpenAI.