​🍾 IROS 2026 x Saturday Robotics — Robotics Research Night | Reading Club 30. Pittsburgh 9/28

​📅 Monday, September 29
🕠 5:30 PM – 9:30 PM
📍 Pittsburgh, PA (walking distance from David L. Lawrence Convention Center)

​About Event

​After a full day of technical sessions at IROS 2026, join Saturday Robotics for an evening of high-signal technical discussions, lightning talks, and networking with researchers, founders, engineers, investors, and students building the future of robotics.

​Saturday Robotics has become one of Silicon Valley's largest community-driven robotics research groups, bringing together researchers from Google DeepMind, NVIDIA, Stanford, UC Berkeley, CMU, MIT, Physical Intelligence, Tesla, Figure, Agility Robotics, Skild AI, Boston Dynamics, and many leading robotics startups.

​Whether you're presenting at IROS, recruiting collaborators, building a startup, or simply interested in meeting others working on Physical AI, we'd love to see you in Pittsburgh.

​Agenda

​🕠 5:30 PM – 6:00 PM
Doors Open & Happy Hour Networking

​Grab a drink, meet fellow attendees, reconnect with old friends, and make new ones before the technical sessions begin.

​🕕 6:00 PM – 7:30 PM
Lightning Talks

​We're opening a limited number of community lightning talk slots.

​~10 minutes each

• ​Research-focused and technical

• ​A few slides are sufficient

• ​Frontier papers, new projects, open problems, practical lessons, demos, or startup technical insights

​Topics include (but are not limited to):

• ​World Models

• ​Physical AI

• ​Humanoid Robotics

• ​Vision-Language-Action Models

• ​Robot Foundation Models

• ​Robot Learning

• ​Manipulation

• ​Reinforcement Learning

• ​Simulation & Sim-to-Real

• ​Spatial Intelligence

• ​Computer Vision

• ​Embodied AI

​📣 Call for Lightning Talks

​Interested in speaking?

​Please email junfanzhu98@gmail.com with:

• ​Talk title

• ​Abstract

• ​Name & affiliation

• ​Relevant links (arXiv paper, GitHub, slides, blog, etc.)

​Priority will be given to technically deep talks that encourage hot takes & discussion within the robotics research community.

​🕢 7:30 PM – 8:00 PM
Open Discussion & Paper Roundtable

​Bring a paper you'd like to highlight!

​We'll host informal roundtable discussions (approximately 10–20 minutes per topic) where participants can briefly introduce recent papers, explain why they matter, and discuss technical ideas, implementation details, open questions, and future directions.

​Everyone is welcome to start a discussion.

​🕗 8:00 PM – 9:30 PM
Happy Hour & Networking

​Continue conversations over food and drinks with fellow researchers, founders, students, and engineers.

​Who Should Join?

​Anyone attending IROS interested in:

• ​Physical AI

• ​World Models

• ​Humanoid Robotics

• ​Robot Learning

• ​Vision-Language-Action Models

• ​Embodied Foundation Models

• ​Manipulation

• ​Reinforcement Learning

• ​Simulation & Digital Twins

• ​Spatial Intelligence

​Whether this is your first Saturday Robotics event or you've attended one of our Reading Clubs before, everyone is welcome.

​Join the Community

​💬 Join our Discord Community
https://discord.gg/WH7DrTHRXK

​𝕏 Follow Saturday Robotics on X
https://x.com/saturdayrobotic

​⚠️ Space is limited. Please RSVP so we can estimate attendance.

​Looking forward to meeting everyone at IROS 2026 in Pittsburgh!