🥂 Saturday Robotics x SF Deep Tech Week Research Night 06/25 | Robotics & World Models Reading Club 14
Date: June 25, 2026 (Thursday)
Time: 5:30 PM — 9:30 PM (tentative)
Location: San Francisco (Downtown), CA
Organized by: Saturday Robotics & World Models Reading Club x
This will keep the same high-signal, deep-discussion format that defines our weekly Saturday sessions: technical sharing, sharp questions, open discussion, and real exchange between people actively working on robotics, world models, embodied AI, computer vision, and physical intelligence.
Hosts: Saturday Robotics. Saturday Robotics is a high signal reading group for robotics & world models researchers, founders, and builders in SF. Previous sessions have hosted researchers and builders from teams including Boston Dynamics, Google DeepMind, NVIDIA, Stanford, UC Berkeley, Rhoda AI, Meta FAIR, Generalist, Dyna Robotics, and leading Bay Area robotics startups. The weekly discussions have also generated in-depth public technical writeups and community posts that have drawn attention from researchers across the field, including engagement from Yann LeCun.
Opening Remarks (3 min each)
- Junfan Zhu & Aurora Feng, Founders of Saturday Robotics
SF Deep Tech Week Research Night Lightning Talks & Panels
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Mike Roberts. Senior Research Scientist, Adobe Research. Stanford PhD. Author of Hypersim (synthetic computer vision dataset. SPEAR: A Simulator for Photorealistic Embodied AI Research. (ECCV 2026 accepted).- Interactive simulators have become powerful tools for training embodied agents and generating synthetic visual data, but existing photorealistic simulators suffer from limited generality, programmability, and rendering speed. We address these limitations by introducing SPEAR: A Simulator for Photorealistic Embodied AI Research. At its core, SPEAR is a Python library that can connect to, and programmatically control, any Unreal Engine (UE) application via a modular plugin architecture. SPEAR exposes over 14K unique UE functions to Python, representing an order-of-magnitude increase in programmable functionality over existing UE-based simulators. Additionally, a single SPEAR instance can render 1920x1080 photorealistic beauty images directly into a user's NumPy array at 70 frames per second -- an order of magnitude faster than existing UE plugins -- while also providing ground truth image modalities that are not available in any existing UE-based simulator (e.g., a non-diffuse intrinsic image decomposition, material IDs, and physically based shading parameters). Finally, SPEAR introduces an expressive high-level programming model that enables users to specify complex graphs of UE work with arbitrary data dependencies among work items, and to execute these graphs deterministically within a single UE frame. We demonstrate the utility of SPEAR through a diverse collection of example applications: controlling multiple embodied agents with distinct action spaces (e.g., humans, cars, and robots) across several in-the-wild UE projects; rendering photorealistic city-scale environments; manipulating UE's procedural content generation system; rendering synchronized multi-view images of detailed human faces; running an interactive co-simulation with the MuJoCo physics simulator; and editing scenes using natural-language instructions via a vision-and-language coding assistant.
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Panel / Open technical Q&A.- Simone Totaro, CTO at Saturn Dynamics.- Saturn Dynamics are building compute-efficient world models for robotics, focused on making physical-world intelligence observable, verifiable, and scalable.
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Compute-efficient World ModelsEvaluation Gap in World ModelsPrecision Gap in World Models — and whether data alone will ever get us there
Open Floor Discussions + Q&A
We'd also love to hear your hot takes on:
"What's still the bottleneck around embodied AI systems? more by model architecture, embodied data, physical grounding, or evaluation?"
We welcome CVPR attendees, researchers, engineers, founders, and builders working on relevant frontier topics, including but not limited to:
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Robotics world models and action-conditioned prediction
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JEPA / V-JEPA-style predictive representation learning
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Vision-language-action models, world-action models, and robot foundation models
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Human egocentric video, UMI-style data, teleoperation, and robot-collected interaction data
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Multimodal world models across vision, tactile, proprioception, language, and action
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Cross-embodiment transfer, long-horizon planning, and embodied generalization
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Physical grounding, spatial understanding, simulation, and evaluation for robot learning
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Video generation/video world models for robotics
Schedule (tentative)
5:30 to 6:00 PMDoors open, dinner, drinks, strawberries, and networking. 🥘🍾🍓
6:00 to 6:15 PMOpening remarks from Saturday Robotics.
6:15 to 7:15 PMKeynote/lightning talks.
7:15 to 8:15 PMPanels, open technical Q&A and roundtable discussion.
8:15 to 9:30 PMFree-form discussion, curated introductions, and open mingling.
Join Discord Community
Follow Saturday Robotics
https://x.com/saturdayrobotichttps://www.linkedin.com/company/saturdayrobotic/
Follow Our YouTube Channel
https://www.youtube.com/@saturdayrobotic
Call for Keynotes, Panelists & Lightning Talks
🚀 Calling for Keynotes, Panelists & Lightning Talks🥂 Saturday Robotics x SF Deep Tech Week Happy Hour 06/25 | Robotics & World Models Reading Club 14👉🏻 RSVP: https://luma.com/l1g9c2l1As part of Saturday Robotics Deep Tech Week Summit (June 2026), we're bringing together robotics researchers, founders, investors, and builders during SF Deep Tech Week for an evening of discussions on the future of embodied AI and robotics.📅 June 25, 2026⏰ 5:30 PM – 9:30 PM📍 San FranciscoWe're currently looking for speakers, panelists, and lightning talk presenters interested in sharing insights on:• World Models• Robotics Frontiers: Industry and Academia• Dexterous Manipulation, Cross-Embodiment• Video Generation, SimulationResearchers, startup founders, industry practitioners, and investors are all welcome.If you'd like to be a lightning talk speaker or panelist, please message Junfan Zhu or 📧 [email protected]:• Name + Affiliation• Lightning Talk Abstract, or Proposed Panel Discussion TopicsLooking forward to bringing together the robotics and embodied AI community for an evening of technical discussion, networking, and collaboration.
