Degrees of Freedom: Bring Your Own Robot
A monthly working night for people building physical AI. No robot required.
You built the arm at your kitchen table. You trained the policy overnight on your gaming rig. You collected the teleop data in your garage. The one thing none of it came with: labmates.
Degrees of Freedom is a monthly working night at Mission Robotics for everyone building physical AI without a lab around them. Bring the robot. Bring the sim that refuses to transfer. Bring the gripper that's been 80% assembled since the hackathon. For two hours, the people at the next bench are your labmates.
Schedule
6:00 - Kickoff: Who you are, what you're building, what you want working by 9pm.
6:30-8:30 - Bench time: two hours of real work, quiet enough to think, loud enough to ask the room when you're stuck.
8:30 - Demos: what moved, or put the problem that's blocking you in front of people who have likely fought it before.
Why come
The person next to you has probably already hit your bug. Robotics failure is multidisciplinary: the fix is rarely in the field you know best. A room of mixed builders is the fastest debugger in the city.
A stated goal and two protected hours move a project further than most weekends do.
A robotics space with a test area and workshop, open on a Tuesday night. The best place in San Francisco to set a robot on a table and work.
Bring anything with actuators, and plenty without: arms, drones, grippers, world models, sim pipelines, teleop rigs, half-trained policies, the URDF you can't get right.
Rally SF is a community for AI-first builders and operators in San Francisco.
Sign up for the weekly shortlist of SF events worth showing up for: rallysf.com
Subscribe on YouTube for every recorded Rally talk: youtube.com/@rallysf