Mike Rabbat
AMI Labs
Speaker & panelist
Talk title to be announced
Overview
What does it take to achieve the physical intelligence of a five-year-old? Children learn to manipulate new objects and generalize skills from only a handful of interactions. Despite rapid progress in vision and language, today’s robots remain far less data-efficient and lack comparably rich training data.
Structured Physical Intelligence (SPIN) asks how physical priors and structured world representations can close this gap. Relevant approaches include Visual-Language-Action models (VLAs), world models, object-centric and compositional representations, affordances, and particle-based models. Robotics provides a direct test of whether these ideas support efficient generalization for dexterous manipulation, hierarchical control, and few-shot learning.
The workshop brings researchers together to examine recent advances, current limitations, and open problems. The workshop will feature a live dexterous manipulation challenge that puts today’s robots side by side with a child, with invited talks and a panel discussion.
Research Questions
- Q1 — What structure enables data-efficient physical intelligence?
- Q2 — How should physical agents represent the world?
- Q3 — What should be built in, and what should emerge from scale?
- Q4 — How can structured models generalize and adapt?
- Q5 — How should progress be understood and evaluated?
The Child–Robot Dexterity Challenge
How do today’s robots compare with a child on everyday manipulation tasks?
We invite researchers, students, and practitioners from academia and industry to test their robotic systems alongside a child on the same everyday household tasks. We will compare performance task by task to show what today’s robots can and cannot do and help participants learn from one another.
How it works
We will select three to five everyday manipulation tasks that a child can complete with familiar objects. We will share the final task list and simple completion guidelines before the event so teams can prepare.
Key dates and participation details
- Final tasks and rules: To be announced. Example tasks may include grasping and moving everyday objects, untwisting a bottle cap, inserting an object into a matching opening, folding a piece of cloth, and pouring from one container into another.
- Challenge launch: September 17, 2026
- Registration deadline: October 5, 2026
- Live challenge: November 12, 2026
Hardware
We will provide a bimanual system with two YAM arms, based on the MolmoAct 2 setup, together with a dexterous Sharpa hand setup. Sharpa will support up to five teams with remote experiments and data collection. Teams may also apply to bring their own compatible hardware, subject to approval and venue safety requirements.
Evaluation
We will share completion guidelines and details on timing, attempts, resets, and autonomy with teams before the event. We will provide a short, task-by-task summary of the demonstrations, with a focus on friendly comparison and shared learning.
The child and participating robotic systems will try the same tasks, giving the audience a familiar point of comparison.
How to express interest
Email the organizing team at roeiherz@gmail.com, amirb4r@gmail.com, or csferrazza@berkeley.edu with:
- Your name, affiliation, and contact information
- A brief description of your system or proposed contribution
- Whether you would use organizer-provided hardware or bring your own
- Your space, power, networking, setup, and safety requirements
- Any other constraints we should know about
Speakers
All four invited speakers are committed, and will also join the panel discussion.
Jeannette Bohg
Stanford University
Speaker & panelist
Talk title to be announced
Yunzhu Li
Columbia University
Speaker & panelist
Talk title to be announced
Georgia Chalvatzaki
TU Darmstadt
Speaker & panelist
Talk title to be announced
Schedule
Tentative morning half-day schedule, in person.
| 8:30 | Welcome — opening remarks, tasks and rules (10 min) |
| 8:40 | Keynote Talk 1 — 25 min + 5 min Q&A |
| 9:10 | Keynote Talk 2 — 25 min + 5 min Q&A |
| 9:40 | Challenge, Part 1 — 40 min. |
| 10:20 | Keynote Talk 3 — 25 min + 5 min Q&A |
| 10:50 | Keynote Talk 4 — 25 min + 5 min Q&A |
| 11:20 | Challenge, Part 2 and Judging — 40 min. |
| 12:00 | Results and Panel: What is Next in Structured Physical Intelligence Models? — 45 min. |
| 12:45 | Concluding remarks — 5 min |
| 12:50 | Adjourn |
Organizers
Advisory Board
Contact
Questions about the workshop can go to roeiherz@gmail.com, amirb4r@gmail.com, or csferrazza@berkeley.edu.
Sponsors
We gratefully acknowledge the support of our sponsors.
