Agenda

September 23
8:30am
Doors open
Registration + Light Breakfast
9:00am
Opening remarks
Welcome to Actuate 2025
9:20am
Keynote
NVIDIA
Dr. Jim Fan is the co-Lead of Generalist Embodied Agent Group (GEAR) at NVIDIA. GEAR’s mission is to build generally capable Physical AI. Dr. Fan’s team is spearheading Project GR00T, NVIDIA’s moonshot initiative at building the AI brain for humanoid robotics. Previously, Dr. Fan obtained his Ph.D. degree at Stanford Vision Lab. His publications have won several awards and nominations, including the Outstanding Paper Award at NeurIPS 2022. He spearheaded multiple impactful works on robot foundation models, AI gamers that play Minecraft proficiently, and general-purpose agents that learn to operate a computer. His works have been widely featured in news media, such as New York Times, Forbes, MIT Technology Review, TechCrunch, The WIRED, VentureBeat, etc.
9:50am
Presentation
Solving Real-World Navigation for Humanoid Robots in Dynamic Environments
Vivian Chu, Co-Founder & Chief Innovation Officer at Diligent Robotics, will discuss technical strategies for physical interaction with legacy hospital infrastructure—such as navigating elevator buttons, automated doors, and access-controlled zones—and walk through key system design decisions made to enable reliable, respectful, and safe humanoid robot navigation in busy, human-centric indoor environments.

As hospitals represent some of the most complex, safety-critical environments for robots, this talk will highlight how recent advances in applied AI are pushing the boundaries of what robots can achieve in real-world collaborative scenarios.
10:10am
Conversation
Fireside Chat with Kyle Vogt
Kyle Vogt is the Founder and CEO of The Bot Company, a robotics startup making affordable household robots. He previously founded Cruise, which was sold to GM for $1 billion and ultimately completed 250,000 driverless rides. Previously, Vogt was a cofounder of Twitch. He studied Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at MIT.
10:40am
Break
20-Minute Stretch & Connect
11:00am
Presentation
End to End Robotics in Rust
Vivek Bagaria is the Autonomy Lead at Matic Robots, a company with the mission of automating home chores to give back people their time and energy.Vivek holds a PhD in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University and a Bachelor's from IIT Madras.At Matic, he introduced Rust and spearheaded its adoption across the whole software stack — establishing robust technical foundations throughout the company.
11:20am
Presentation
Foundation Reward Models for Robot Learning
Jason Ma is co-founder at Dyna Robotics. He received his PhD from University of Pennsylvania, where he studied scalable reinforcement learning algorithms and foundation models for robot learning. His research has been recognized with honors such as RSS Pioneers, Apple and OpenAI Fellowship, Best Paper Finalist at ICRA 2024, Top 10 NVIDIA Research Projects of 2023, and covered by popular media such as the Economist, Fox, Yahoo, and TechCrunch.
11:40am
Presentation
Building with Nix for Embedded Systems
Embedded systems often require customization throughout all levels of the firmware/software stack (custom toolchains, platform firmware, kernel drivers, device trees, system libraries, and applications), which can quickly become a unmanageable tower of complexity for the build system.

Nix does a particularly good job of allowing a developer to comprehensively define, track (with version-control), and reproducibly build system software with these customizations in a way that systematically prevents many of the build problems associated with using traditional tools.

In this presentation, I'll share some of the wins and lessons learned as a result of adopting and heavily relying on NixOS.
12:00pm
Presentation
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TBA...
12:30pm
Break
Lunch
2:00pm
Panel
Middleware vs. Minimalism: Should you Build on ROS or Start from Scratch?
Robotics’ teams wrestle with whether to adopt ROS, extend it, or rip it out entirely. Some swear by its ecosystem; others view it as tech debt from day one.
2:40pm
Presentation
Multi-Robot Teaming to Serve Food
A common human task in food assembly is having multiple workers place the same ingredient into alternating bowls moving at a high rate of speed to increase throughput. While this seems simple at first, detecting which bowl already has an ingredient in it with 99.999% accuracy over thousands of ingredients proves challenging for robots.

In this presentation I'll share how we get robots to achieve similar performance to humans, deep dive into the various engineering efforts we've taken to solve this challenge in production (classical computer vision, mesh networking, SLAM, Siamese neural networks, KNN) and how our robots have served millions of bowls utilizing the features we built.
3:00pm
Presentation
Last 100 Meters: Autonomy Challenges in Scaling Drone Delivery to Every Home
With over 100 million autonomous miles flown across eight countries and four continents, Zipline is transforming access t o healthcare, consumer products, and food. In this talk, we’ll explore how Zipline designed Platform 2 for safe, precise, and magical deliveries at scale. We’ll dive into the autonomy challenges of navigating the incredible diversity of real-world homes and delivering packages exactly where customers want them—threading through tree cover in wind or dodging powerlines at night. We’ll share how data and simulation fuel our ML-driven autonomy stack and highlight key challenges ahead.
3:20pm
Presentation
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TBA...
3:40pm
Break
20-Minute Stretch & Connect
4:00pm
Presentation
Fast-Loop Autonomy: How Observability at Scale Accelerates Robotics Development
As Slip Robotics scales fleets of SlipBots for real-world dock operations, the challenge shifts from making autonomy work once to making it work everywhere—safely, efficiently, and consistently. This talk unpacks the architecture that makes that possible. Dennis will show how Slip uses Foxglove, custom data pipelines, and internal monitoring tools to:

• Surface meaningful trends from across the fleet
• Link autonomy failures to real-world conditions
• Automate debugging and regression detection
• Enable rapid iteration on autonomy software, even with tight customer uptime requirements"
4:20pm
Conversation
Co-Piloting Autonomy: Engineers and Operators Scaling Real-World Robotics Together
Deploying autonomous robots in the real world is a complex challenge that goes beyond perfecting algorithms. Unpredictable environments, safety requirements, and operational complexities can derail even the smartest robots once they leave the lab. This fireside chat explores how combining advanced autonomy with human expertise helps bridge that gap. By effectively "co-piloting"—pairing engineers and field operators throughout the process—teams can scale robotic systems in dynamic real-world settings more safely and efficiently.

Heidi and Jess will dive into how to build robust feedback loops from field operations back into development. They will share practical methods for observing and measuring robot performance in real time, defining reliability metrics, and handling edge cases encountered on the job. The session also explores strategies to scale an autonomous fleet without compromising visibility or safety, and how clear handoff logic ensures smooth transitions between autonomy and human control. Attendees will gain insight into effective collaboration patterns between engineering and pilot teams that improve system reliability and ensure deployments can scale successfully.
5:00pm
Reception
Happy Hour Networking
September 24
8:30am
Doors open
Light Breakfast
9:00am
Keynote
Physical Intelligence
9:30am
Keynote
Wayve
TBA...
10:00am
Keynote
The Future of Intelligent Automated Logistics
How do you orchestrate a fleet of thousands of robots in real-time to manage the movement of millions of cartons through a warehouse per day? In this session, James Kuffner, Chief Technology Officer of Symbotic – a pioneering leader in robotics – will discuss his transition to Symbotic, a company delivering advanced AI-powered logistics robot fleets to the global supply chain. The recent rapid progress in machine learning, computer vision and perception, as well as increased computing power have enabled a new generation of intelligent robots that can operate reliably in semi-structured environments like warehouses. Innovative new algorithms for multi-robot motion and task planning will scale the technology even further, creating exciting new opportunities for the future of intelligent automated logistics.
10:30am
Conversation
Fireside Chat with RJ Scaringe
Deploying autonomous robots in the real world is a complex challenge that goes beyond perfecting algorithms. Unpredictable environments, safety requirements, and operational complexities can derail even the smartest robots once they leave the lab. This fireside chat explores how combining advanced autonomy with human expertise helps bridge that gap. By effectively "co-piloting"—pairing engineers and field operators throughout the process—teams can scale robotic systems in dynamic real-world settings more safely and efficiently.

Heidi and Jess will dive into how to build robust feedback loops from field operations back into development. They will share practical methods for observing and measuring robot performance in real time, defining reliability metrics, and handling edge cases encountered on the job. The session also explores strategies to scale an autonomous fleet without compromising visibility or safety, and how clear handoff logic ensures smooth transitions between autonomy and human control. Attendees will gain insight into effective collaboration patterns between engineering and pilot teams that improve system reliability and ensure deployments can scale successfully.
11:10am
Break
20-Minute Stretch & Connect
11:30am
Presentation
From Pixels to Parts: Deploying Direct CAD-to-Robot Workflows in Construction
Reframe Systems is transforming modular construction of climate-resilient homes through software-driven robotic automation. Our platform enables direct-to-robot workflows that bring CAD models to life, allowing for highly customizable manufacturing at production scale. We will explore how we've deployed a vision-driven robotic end-point that seamlessly operates from our Onshape CAD environment. This direct connection enables automated generation and validation of robot instructions without manual translation layers. Our first robotic platform has built over 1000 linear feet of residential walls for customer projects, a milestone made possible by our emphasis on short-cutting development to intercept production as early as possible, rapid hardware iteration ( through our patent-pending universal magnetic fixturing among other design decisions), and vision-based adaptability. This foundation puts us on track to achieve 90% of all panels per project by the end of the year. Our approach highlights flexibility and scalability, empowering robotics workcells to dynamically adapt to diverse production demands.
11:50am
Presentation
Eyes for Humanoids and Advanced Robotic Applications Enabled by Marrying Optical Physics with ML Techniques
Robotics has gained significant momentum with the advancement of VLAs. Relying on traditional RGB cameras for vision is an affordable and scalable option, but they have limited capabilities in scenarios encountered by humanoids, wheeled indoor robots and manipulations. Even expensive lidars struggle to provide accurate and reliable depth in these scenarios such as detection of glass cups, glass doors, reflective indoor floors, shiny metal objects, thin wires, dark objects, etc. By using plenoptic sensing technology, we are able to provide significant benefits over contemporary vision systems thereby offering a good balance between cost and performance. In summary, we are able to provide the high quality of lidar at the cost of traditional RGB cameras. Learn how combining optical physics with transformers and other ML techniques is enabling sharper and scalable vision systems for the next wave of robotics. The technology has found product market fit and is currently in the phase of scaling deployments in applications such as delivery robots, robotic arms with end-effectors, indoor robots/humanoids, and autonomous vehicles.
12:10pm
Presentation
Lessons from Deploying 2,000 Delivery Robots Across Geographies
TBA...
12:30pm
Break
Lunch
2:00pm
Panel
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2:40pm
Keynote
Foxglove
TBA...
3:00pm
Presentation
Unnatural Selection: Evolving Robotic Systems within Systems of Compounding Complexity
TBA...
3:20am
Presentation
Skild AI
Deepak Pathak is CEO & Co-Founder of Skild AI and Professor at Carnegie Mellon University working on developing an AI foundation model for robotics. He is known for pioneering contributions to AI including self-supervised learning, artificial curiosity and sim2real adaptation for robot learning. Deepak has received several prestigious honors including Sloan Fellow, MIT TR 35under35, Okawa Fellow, IIT Kanpur Young Alumnus Award and multiple Best Paper Awards. Deepak's research has been featured in popular press outlets, including The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Quanta Magazine, Washington Post, CNET, Wired, and MIT Technology Review among others. Earlier, he received his Ph.D. from UC Berkeley and his Bachelor's from IIT Kanpur with a Gold Medal in Computer Science.
3:40pm
Break
20-Minute Stretch & Connect
4:00pm
Presentation
Advanced Autonomy for the Built World
TBA...
4:30pm
Keynote
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4:50pm
Closing Remarks
Thank you!
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