Hosts: Junfan Zhu, Aurora Feng
discord.gg/WH7DrTHRXK
GPT-6 Astra Robotics Hardware Hackathon: Saturday Robotics × Robotics Center. SF
GPT-6 Astra Robotics Hardware Hackathon: Saturday Robotics × Robotics Center. SF
One day. Real robots. Frontier models.
Frontier models can plan, write code and drive a computer. The open question is what happens when one has to close a gripper on a real object.
For one full day — morning to night — Saturday Robotics and Robotics Center of Silicon Valley are putting frontier models on real hardware at Robotics Center's SF lab. No simulators: humanoids, arms, a quadruped, dexterous hands and teleop gloves on the floor, with mentors from the Bay Area robotics community all day.
Location
San Francisco
Date
TBD
🍽️ Food & Beverages
Not pizza 🍕 — but delicious authentic Chinese dim sum 🥘🍣🍱🥟🍤🍙🍘, plus plenty of great food throughout the day. You definitely won’t go hungry! 😋
🌱 Vegan options available
🍓 Unlimited strawberries
🧋 Afternoon boba & fruit tea 🍹
🍛 Dinner: a delicious fusion mix of favorites 🍮🍝🍗🫛
Come for the robotics, stay for the food. 🤖🍴
On the floor (provided by Robotics Center)
M1 Mobile Manipulator — dual-arm mobile manipulator
Unitree G1 — humanoid
Unitree Go2 — quadruped
OpenArm — robotic arm
Wuji Hand 2 — dexterous hand
Wuji Glove — teleoperation glove
plus Aloha leader arms, tactile sensor kits, cameras and spare parts
Who it's for
Researchers, founders, engineers and students working on robot learning, VLA policies, world models, teleoperation and data collection. Bring a team of 1–4, or come solo and we'll match you in the morning.
Format (tentative — final schedule with the date)
9:00 · Check-in, hardware briefing, team forming
10:00 · Build starts — mentors on the floor
13:00 · Lunch + lightning talks
18:00 · Dinner
20:00 · Demos in front of judges
21:00 · Awards and wrap
Tracks & prizes — announced with the final date. Expect tracks around dexterous manipulation, teleoperation & data, and whole-body control.
What to bring — a laptop, your own API keys if you have them, and anything you want to mount on a robot. All robots stay on site.
Hosts
Saturday Robotics — Robotics Research Forum: a 3,000+ member Silicon Valley forum running a weekly robotics & world-models reading group, with researchers and founders from Google DeepMind, NVIDIA, Physical Intelligence, Generalist, Sunday, OpenAI, Meta FAIR, Tesla, Figure, Skild AI, Stanford, Berkeley, CMU, MIT, Bay Area top robotics startups and top VCs.
Robotics Center of Silicon Valley: a San Francisco robotics infrastructure hub — hardware, data collection, fleet teleoperation and education for research and industry teams — with a showroom and lab at 90 Welsh St.
Sponsors & partners
We're raising sponsorship for prizes, compute and operations, and every tier is open.
Who we're talking to: OpenAI — the GPT-6 Astra team, partnerships & community, and OpenAI Startups — plus frontier labs, cloud and inference providers, robotics companies, and funds backing physical AI. Warm intros are as welcome as cheques.
Title Partner — $50,000
"Presented by" naming and logo lockup across the poster, event page, stage and recap · opening remarks · judge seat · dedicated demo bay · hiring booth · 10 guest passes
Gold — $20,000
Logo on poster, event page and stage loop · 20-minute tech talk or workshop · judge seat · demo table · 6 guest passes · recruiting access
Silver — $10,000
Logo on poster and event page · mentor slot during the build · recruiting table · 4 guest passes
Prize Track — $5,000 (per award)
Name and present an award (e.g. "Best Dexterous Manipulation") · judge seat · logo beside that track · 2 guest passes
In-kind
GPU hours, inference or API credits, model access, cloud infrastructure, sensors and spare parts, travel stipends for teams, or food and coffee for the floor — each recognised at the cash tier matching fair value. What moves the needle most is compute credits and cash; the robots themselves are already covered by Robotics Center.
Where sponsorship goes: prize pool and per-track bounties · compute and API credits handed to teams during the build · meals and coffee for the full day · hardware consumables and teleop rigs · recap video and technical write-ups.
Talk to us: junfanzhu98@gmail.com (Junfan Zhu) · yfeng01@stanford.edu (Aurora Feng) · jerry@roboticscenter.ai (Jerry Huang, Robotics Center)
Join us
Saturday Robotics WhatsApp:
Join Discord Community
Follow Saturday Robotics
Follow YouTube
Subscribe to Luma Calendar
https://luma.com/saturdayrobotic
Applications
Registration is approval-based. Tell us what you'd build and which hardware you want — capacity is limited by the number of robots in the room.
Community-run event. Not affiliated with, sponsored by, or endorsed by OpenAI.
Hosts: Junfan Zhu, Aurora Feng
discord.gg/WH7DrTHRXK