🍾🍲 Saturday Robotics x IROS 2026 — Robotics Research Night 👉🏻 We’re bringing a high-signal evening of robotics research to Pittsburgh on September 28. After a full day at IROS, we’ll bring together researchers, engineers, founders, students, and investors for technical discussions, networking, and a series of ~10-minute lightning talks. Tentative preview of the current lineup: 🤖 1. PAC-MAN: Perception-Aware CBF-RL for Whole-Body Safety in Humanoid Dodgeball Gary Yang @lzyang2000 (@Caltech) Perception-aware reinforcement learning + Control Barrier Functions for whole-body humanoid safety. Demonstrated on a Unitree G1, with 19/20 successful dodges and zero falls in real-world experiments. 🧠 2. How In-Context Learning Is Reshaping Robot Learning Data at Scale AaronLi (@RhodaAI) Exploring how in-context learning can change the way we think about robot learning data, scaling, and generalization. 🧪 3. X2Real: An eXtensive Simulation Benchmark for Real-World Generalist Policies Liangwang Ruan (@XSquareRobot) A new simulation benchmark built around faithfulness, diversity, and fairness, with 44 hierarchical long-horizon tasks across 10 capability dimensions and a reported 0.84 simulation-to-real correlation. 🦾 4. Rethinking Generalist Robotic Manipulation: Architecture, Data and Inference for Real-World Deployment Peiyan Li (Chinese Academy of Sciences, @CAS__Science) 3D VLA architectures, memory augmentation, ego/UMI human priors, large-scale robot pretraining, and inference-time contextual learning for deployable generalist manipulation. 🎯 5. HiRE: Hindsight Reward Editing for Policy Finetuning Haoyi Niu @t641769919 (@UCBerkeley) Accepted at CoRL 2026. A training-free approach to reward editing that uses successful and failed trajectories to identify “trap states” and provide denser, control-aware feedback for RL. 🔥 6. Lightning Talk — Open Slot We’re opening one additional slot for a technically deep research talk, new project, frontier paper, demo, open problem, or startup technical insight. 10 minutes. A few slides. One sharp technical idea. No fluff. Topics include World Models, Physical AI, Humanoids, VLAs, Robot Foundation Models, Manipulation, RL, Simulation & Sim-to-Real, Spatial Intelligence, Computer Vision, and Embodied AI. 📍 Pittsburgh 📅 September 28, 2026 🕠 5:30–9:30 PM 🍾 Networking + Technical Talks + Research Discussion 📩 junfanzhu98@gmail.com See you in Pittsburgh. 🤖 #IROS2026# #Robotics# #PhysicalAI# #RobotLearning# #WorldModels# #HumanoidRobotics# #VLA# #EmbodiedAI# #RobotFoundationModels#