Robotics & World Models Reading Club 15: Scaling Touch: Flexible Tactile Skin for Dexterous Manipulation — Los Altos 0627

​Robotics & World Models Reading Club 15: Scaling Touch: Flexible Tactile Skin for Dexterous Manipulation — Los Altos 06/27

​A high-signal reading group for AI researchers & builders pushing the frontiers of robotic world models, WAMs, and embodied intelligence. In our previous sessions, we brought together researchers and engineers from Boston Dynamics, Google DeepMind, NVIDIA, Stanford, UC Berkeley, Dyna, Physical Intelligence, Tesla, Generalist, Rhoda AI, and leading Bay Area robotics startups.

​Hosted by Junfan Zhu & Aurora Feng.

​Thanks to our sponsors, Foothill Ventures and Lenovo Capital!

​Foothill Ventures: Foothill Ventures is a $300M fund that bets on highly technical, very early-stage companies in frontier tech. We are based in Los Altos, California. We are investing in seed and series A startups in North America. Learn more at https://www.foothill.ventures/.

​Lenovo Capital: Lenovo Capital is the corporate venture capital arm of Lenovo, a Global Fortune 200 multinational technology company with $70B in annual revenue from AI PC, Motorola smartphone, data center and IT solution businesses. Lenovo Capital manages nearly $4.0 billion of assets and has invested in more than 300 companies globally, building a strong track record that includes over 25 IPOs and 60 unicorn startups. Its core investment sectors encompass computing, artificial intelligence, robotics, energy, and healthcare.

​Reading Club 15's Core Theme

​Scaling Touch: Flexible Tactile Skin for Dexterous Manipulation

​Tactile and visual perception are crucial for fine-grained human interactions with the environment. Developing similar multimodal sensing capabilities for robots can significantly enhance and expand their manipulation skills. This talk presents a scalable tactile stack that couples flexible, large-area tactile skin with multimodal perception and simulation-driven learning. (1) Hardware. I will first introduce a low-cost, flexible tactile “skin,” outline the associated design choices, explain why I value it over other sensors in different contexts, and describe how I integrate it into the system to ensure high-quality tactile data. (2) Learning. Vision and touch have distinct natures yet are both important for robot decision making; I will explain how we encode tactile and visual data so that both contribute effectively to the decision-making process. (3) Scaling up Tactile Data. I will present two directions: (i) using portable tactile devices to collect large-scale real-world tactile data and leveraging this dataset to enhance policy learning, and (ii) leveraging tactile simulation to increase policy robustness. We use a real-to-sim-to-real pipeline that calibrates a GPU-parallel tactile simulation and uses RL fine-tuning to let policies explore with the small corrective “wiggling” behaviors required for tight-fit bimanual assembly.

​Keynote Speaker: Binghao Huang is a third-year Ph.D. student in Computer Science at Columbia University advised by Prof. Yunzhu Li. He earned an M.S. in Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering from UC San Diego (advisor: Prof. Xiaolong Wang) and has worked at NVIDIA Seattle Robotics Lab. His research spans robot learning, dexterous manipulation, and multimodal perception.

​​​​​​​Pre-Readings

​

​​​​​Location

​Los Altos (Downtown)

​​​​​​​​Date & Time

​Saturday, June 27, 2026 | 2:00 PM – 5:00 PM

​​​​​​​​​Join Discord Community

​https://discord.gg/WH7DrTHRXK

​​​​​​​​Follow Saturday Robotics on X

​https://x.com/saturdayrobotic

​​​​​​​​Agenda

​2:00 PM – 2:30 PM Door Opens & Social

• ​Food 😋, beverages🧋 and UNLIMITED strawberries 🍓 (our official reading club fruits ☺️😄).

​2:30 PM – 4:00 PM Keynote by Binghao Huang is a third-year Ph.D. student in Computer Science at Columbia University advised by Prof. Yunzhu Li. He earned an M.S. in Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering from UC San Diego (advisor: Prof. Xiaolong Wang) and has worked at NVIDIA Seattle Robotics Lab. His research spans robot learning, dexterous manipulation, and multimodal perception.

​Online access via Zoom: TBD

​YouTube Recording: TBD (We are looking for recording volunteers)

​4:00 PM – 5:00 PM Q&A, ​open-floor roundtable (10–20 min per topic) on spotlight papers or any paper you’d like to highlight. Feel free to share why the paper matters and its technical details.

​​​​​​​Future events

​#reading-club-20-0725: Mountain View 07/25

• ​Session 20 Luma: https://luma.com/5ltk12w5

​#SIGGRAPH-reading-club-19-0722: SIGGRAPH x Saturday Robotics — World Models for Robotics: Bridging Graphics, Simulation & Physical Intelligence | Reading Club 19, LA 07/22

• ​Session 19 Luma: https://luma.com/yh2212ac

​#reading-club-18-0718: Causal World Models For Real-World Intelligence. SF 07/18

• ​Session 18 Luma: https://luma.com/f74eguvr

​#reading-club-17-0711: Soft Tactile-Centric Multimodal Intelligence Toward Safe and Dexterous Manipulation. SF 07/11

• ​Session 17 Luma: https://luma.com/e53zawq2

​#reading-club-16-0704:

• ​Session 16 Luma: https://luma.com/cgzyfpeb

​#reading-club-15-0627: Scaling Touch: Flexible Tactile Skin for Dexterous Manipulation

• ​Session 15 Luma: https://luma.com/7lts5ppf

​#deep-tech-week-14-0625: Deep Tech Week Research Night

• ​Session 14 Luma: https://luma.com/l1g9c2l1

​​​​​​Past events

​#reading-club-13-0620: HumanEgo: Train Robot Policy from 30 min Egocentric Videos — SF 0620

• ​Session 13 Luma: https://luma.com/6vkhxnum

• ​Reading Club 13 Review 1: HumanEgo: Zero-Shot Robot Learning, Human Egocentric Video, Leo Wang, Amazon FAR & UMaryland https://x.com/junfanzhu98/status/2068603103138713824?s=20

• ​Reading Club 13 Recap 1: https://x.com/junfanzhu98/status/2068605511549743127?s=20

• ​Reading Club 13 Review 2: Causal World Models: Biwei Huang, Aether AI & UCSD

• ​https://x.com/junfanzhu98/status/2068743219685560453?s=20

• ​Reading Club 13 Recap 2: https://x.com/junfanzhu98/status/2068746229643936177?s=20

​#reading-club-12-0613: Origami Robotics (YC W26) on Dexterity

• ​Session 12 Luma: https://luma.com/5w7c1t2a

• ​Reading Club 12 Review: https://x.com/junfanzhu98/status/2066275974988337178?s=20

• ​Reading Club 12 Recap: https://x.com/junfanzhu98/status/2066278639554245097?s=20

​#cvpr-denver-11-0606: 🤖🥘 Saturday Robotics x Manycore Tech x Neural Motion | CVPR 2026 Denver Research Night | Robotics & World Models Reading Club 11

​Junfan Zhu & Aurora Feng, Founders of Saturday Robotics

​Anthony Zhao, Head of North America at Manycore Tech SpacialVerse

​Aurora Feng, Founder at Neural Motion. NM-GenET.

​Max Zhaoshuo Li, Robotics and World Model Tech Lead at NVIDIA Cosmos. Cosmos 3.

​Xiaofan Li, World Model Tech Lead at X Square Robot. WALL-WM.

​Zesen Zhao, University of Michigan. Test-Time Scaling for World Action Models via Zero-Shot Geometric Verification.

​Pengyi Liao. VGGT-Ω: From 3D Reconstruction to Scalable Spatial Representation.

​Jie Wang, University of Pennsylvania, GRASP Lab. Toward a Robotics MMLU: Lessons from Sim & Real Evaluations of Generalist Policies.

​Gordon Qian, Senior AI Researcher at Snap. Diffusion-DRF: Free, Rich, and Differentiable Reward for Video Diffusion Fine-Tuning.

• ​YouTube livestream: https://www.youtube.com/live/P_3gSC-5cYM?si=530zqf2NscCq643O

• ​CVPR Denver Research Night Luma: https://luma.com/zamm9g2g

• ​CVPR Denver Research Night Lightning Talks Review: https://x.com/junfanzhu98/status/2065102150418788581?s=20

• ​CVPR Denver Research Night Lightning Talks Recap: https://x.com/junfanzhu98/status/2065104616497524843?s=20

• ​CVPR Hot Takes Review: https://x.com/junfanzhu98/status/2065234892653547904?s=20

• ​CVPR Hot Takes Recap: https://x.com/junfanzhu98/status/2065236892988416166?s=20#reading-club-08-0516: Embodied Human Data as the “Internet of Motion and Behavior”

• ​Session 08 Luma: https://luma.com/qoxioge7

​#reading-club-07-0509: Learning to Dream: World Models, Imagination, Path to Foundation Models for Control

• ​Session 07 Luma: https://luma.com/srhe0vuo

​#reading-club-06-0502: Evolution of Video World Models for Robotics

• ​Session 06 Luma: https://luma.com/sdrd4zwr

• ​Reading Club 06 Review: https://x.com/junfanzhu98/status/2050834699275383008?s=20

​#reading-club-05-0425: World Models for Physical Intelligence: From Predictive Brains to Embodied Robots

• ​Session 05 Luma: https://luma.com/p7zvpyvg

• ​Reading Club 05 Review: https://x.com/junfanzhu98/status/2048315020946317710?s=20

• ​YouTube Recording: https://youtu.be/RVy6oQXNDgc?si=u2VLtCBjfdMvXaf-

​#reading-club-04-0418: Abstractions of the Physical World for Decision-Making

• ​Session 04 Luma: https://luma.com/atv7bm3i

• ​Reading Club 04 Review: https://x.com/junfanzhu98/status/2045770010979905862

• ​YouTube Recording: https://www.youtube.com/@saturdayrobotic

​#reading-club-03-0411: Robotic Policy Adaptation

• ​Session 03 Luma: https://luma.com/561xgirg

• ​Reading Club 03 Review: https://x.com/junfanzhu98/status/2043243484568768519?s=20

• ​YouTube Recording: https://www.youtube.com/@saturdayrobotic

​#reading-club-02-0404: JEPA Zoo

• ​Session 02 Luma: https://luma.com/g3qrrti0

• ​Reading Club 02 Review (liked by Yann LeCun on X): https://x.com/junfanzhu98/status/2040716119259164673?s=20

​#reading-club-01-0328

• ​Session 01 Luma: https://luma.com/8s4w1wu6

• ​Reading Club 01 Review (liked by Yann LeCun on X): https://x.com/junfanzhu98/status/2038153945219305812

​​​​​​​​Logistics

​Spots are limited. Please arrive by 2:00 PM for check-in. Keynote will begin promptly at 2:30 PM.

• ​We currently do not have volunteers available to assist with late check-ins. Given the high volume of inquiries and 100+ attendees (both online and onsite), we kindly ask that you arrive on time to ensure smooth entry.