🔍 Exploring the Future of Intelligent Robotics — Together Yesterday the Prorok Lab organized and participated in an inspiring away day with the labs of Amanda Prorok, Rika Antonova and Fulvio Forni. Bringing together diverse teams, perspectives, and research agendas sparked exactly the kind of conversations we need as robotics moves rapidly from controlled environments into the dynamic, unpredictable real world.
🤖 Key themes we explored:
🔄 Continual Learning & On-board Learning How do robots adapt on the fly, learn from experience, and update their models safely while operating in the world? From lifelong perception to adaptive control, the discussions made clear that learning doesn’t stop at deployment — it begins there. 🧠 Foundation Models for Real Robots We examined how large-scale pretrained models can evolve into real-time, real-world capable systems. The challenges are substantial — latency, reliability, grounding, safety — but so are the opportunities to unify perception, action, and reasoning in ways previous generations of robots could only approximate. ⚙️ Co-design: Hardware, Algorithms, and Interaction True robotic intelligence isn’t just a software problem. We explored how tighter integration between mechanical design, sensors, compute, and control can unlock new capabilities. Co-design is not a trend; it’s becoming the default approach for next-generation systems. 🌍 Robots in the Human World Perhaps the most important discussion: how do we deploy robots that understand, anticipate, and collaborate with people — not just technically, but ethically and socially? Building trustworthy, intuitive robotic partners is a challenge that spans engineering, design, and human factors.
A huge thank-you to everyone who contributed.
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