Antonia Bronars (@BronarsToni)

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Every robot already carries contact sensors: its own joints. When a robot touches something, its joints drift slightly off their commands, and the encoders pick it up. Legged robots and humanoids already leverage this signal to walk blind - but is it enough for blind precise assembly?

We find that it is! Our policies can insert pegs, mesh gears, and thread nuts using only the robot's joint positions - no camera, no tactile, and no object poses. And the peg policy works zero-shot in the real world! 🧵

w/ my amazing co-first author @younghyo_park, and advised by @kushalk_ and @pulkitology.

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Antonia Bronars @BronarsToni 5h

Proud sister moment! Matt’s paper GPWM won best paper at the “Do Robots Need World Models?” workshop this CoRL! Neat method for handling dynamics prediction and planning in 3D thru one unified architecture :)

Matthew Bronars Verified account @bronars_matthew 5h

Excited to share that our work GPWM: Modeling the World as 3D Particle Motion won the best research paper award at the “Do Robots Need World Models?” workshop at CoRL!

TLDR: one architecture that handles rigid and deformable 3D dynamics prediction can also plan through latent noise optimization. Check out the details here: robertren1122.github.io/gpwm/

Joint work with my fantastic co-first author @RobertRen02!

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Antonia Bronars @BronarsToni Nov 5

Check out our new work exploring the impact of inertia mismatch on the robot learning stack! There are many design objectives to consider when building a robot system -- its impact on robot learning should be one of them

Younghyo Park ✈️CoRL Verified account @younghyo_park Nov 5

Robot arms can be extremely heavy compared to the objects they are asked to manipulate, especially with their metal links and highly geared motors.

But is that actually a problem for robot learning, or are learning algorithms powerful enough to handle it? Are we paying any hidden costs for using heavy robots? Here's what we found 🧵

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Antonia Bronars @BronarsToni Oct 24

I’ve been learning from Toru’s scientific writing for some years now, and it’s similarly valuable to read her thoughts on life :) highly recommend!

Toru Verified account @ToruO_O Oct 24

How should we approach research, when the very field we work on is going through rapid and potentially fundamental changes?

I recently gave a talk at the Stanford Vision Seminar, reflecting on my PhD journey and how AI is changing the way I think about research. I adapted part of it into a new blog post, organized around three questions:
1. What should we work on?
2. How should we work with AI?
3. What is a PhD for?

I hope some of my reflections are helpful. The talk ended with an open discussion, and I’d love to continue it here; curious how others are thinking about these questions.

Personally -- as much as there's FOMO, I also think life is very long, and we have time.

toruowo.github.io/blog/posts/202…
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Antonia Bronars @BronarsToni Oct 20

Cheers, Eka team! 🚀💥 behaviors are looking fast, reactive, and smoooooth

Pulkit Agrawal Verified account @pulkitology Oct 20

@EkaRobotics has raised a $150M Series A.

Generality v/s Performance is the fundamental tension at the frontier of robotics. Generality without performance is just a prototype. Performance without generality is just a single-purpose tool.

Customers shouldn’t have to choose. Eka breaks the tradeoff. Powered by our Vision-Force-Action (VFA) model, we deliver the performance and versatility customers need to put robots to work every day.

Eka is built on three convictions:
⚡️Force is the language of manipulation.
🚀 Reinforcement learning is how dexterous manipulation scales.
🎂 System 1—fast, reliable physical execution—is the bottleneck to solve.

With this funding, we will scale our model and accelerate customer deployments.

Grateful to be building alongside a dream team and investors who share our ambition.

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Antonia Bronars

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