Fireside Chat + Hands-on Robot Workshop with Lucen Robotics
Lucen Robotics builds one software stack for every robot body: bipeds, wheeled robots, quadrupeds and arms, all on the same actuators and an open SDK. On Thursday, Nov 12, co-founders Linyan Fu and Apheth D'Almeida bring four of their robots to campus: a biped, a wheeled biped, a dual open arm and a desk arm. Hear how they build them, then drive them yourself.
1:00 PM · Fireside chat
Linyan and Apheth sit down with the Φ team: Yashvardhan Gupta, Parv Patodia, Sai Krishna Reddy Maligireddy and Vineeth Sakhamuru. We'll ask what it takes to get a robot working outside the lab, how much a robot can learn in simulation versus from real data, and what building a hardware startup looks like from the inside. Open Q&A follows, so bring your questions.
1:45 PM · Lunch
Lunch is on us. Grab a plate and keep the conversation going with the founders.
2:15 PM · Hands-on
Small groups rotate through four stations, and everyone gets time on the robots.
Biped football. Take the joystick and try to score a goal.
Laundry folding. Watch Lucen's arms fold clothes with imitation learning.
Sim-to-real RL. A simple policy trains in a few minutes, so you can change something and watch it run on a real SO-101 arm.
Teleop. Move a leader arm and the robot copies you in real time.
Keep building
Lucen is offering free cloud credits to students who want to train their own policies after the event.
Who should come
Every Northeastern student, from any program. No robotics experience needed. If you already build robots, come talk shop with people who build them for a living.
About Lucen Robotics
Lucen makes programmable biped, wheeled, quadruped and arm robots for developers. Their firmware and SDK are open source under MIT, with LeRobot, MuJoCo and Isaac Sim support. lucenrobotics.com
About Φ
Φ (Physical Hardware Intelligence) is Northeastern Silicon Valley's student robotics club. We train SO-101 robot arms with imitation learning and sim-to-real reinforcement learning, host a robotics podcast, and are in the final round of Robocurve's open robotics benchmark program.
Hands-on runs in small groups, so RSVP to hold your spot.