Monday, September 21, 2026
Three of this week's events are about robotics, and if you can make more than one, they build on each other. Wednesday's Spatial Frontier Club night at Mission Robotics is about the models that reconstruct and reason about 3D space, with talks from Salman Shahid, who works on embodied reasoning at Google DeepMind, and Hokin Deng, who studies video reasoning at Carnegie Mellon. On Saturday afternoon the Robotics & World Models Reading Club takes up Devol Robotics' new world model for contact-rich manipulation, which also predicts how stiff the arm should be as it moves.
Then on Monday the 28th, Degrees of Freedom is back at Mission Robotics for its third session. Come with one thing you want working by the end of the night, whether it's an arm, a sim pipeline or a half-trained policy. The room is mixed enough that someone nearby has probably already hit your bug.
Lee
Coming up at Rally
Degrees of Freedom: Robotics Builders Night @ Mission Robotics
2026-09-28 · 6:00 PM - 9:00 PM
A twice-monthly working night for physical AI builders at a robotics space with actual benches and test areas. Bring your half-finished project, your sim that won't transfer, or just your debugging skills.
Around SF this week
Wednesday, Sep 23, 7:00 PM - 10:30 PM
This one splits over two floors: the first for pizza, lo-fi and talking about what you're building, the second quiet for heads-down work. Long Journey and The Residency mark a year of these with a late-night matcha pop-up.
Wednesday, Sep 23, 8:30 AM - 10:00 AM
Some weeks you talk to chat interfaces more than people, which is the premise of this one: laptops open at Corgi Cafe on Claude Lane, no agenda. Comet's Opik team hosts, breakfast and coffee included.
Thursday, Sep 24, 6:00 PM - 8:00 PM
Business owners from around SF describe what is hard in their work right now, and some may let you pilot a fix with them. A hackathon follows that weekend to build answers to what comes up.
Thursday, Sep 24, 6:00 PM - 8:30 PM
Encord's evening for women building in ML across the Bay Area is wine, board games and conversation, with no pitches. Drinks start at 6:00 at The Academy, followed by a short panel with Q&A at 6:45.
Thursday, Sep 24, 6:30 PM - 9:30 PM
Flux is launching a new feature for designing enclosures around circuit boards, and you get to try it at the launch. SF Hardware Meetup hosts, with building from 7:15 and demos at 8:30.
Thursday, Sep 24, 9:00 AM - 6:00 PM
Do agents disappoint more the longer they run? Does fixing it mean rewriting memory, orchestration and durable execution? A day of that with Glean's Tony Gentilcore, Hex's Caitlin Colgrove and Andon Labs' Axel Backlund.
Saturday, Sep 26, 10:00 AM - 11:00 PM
The prize for winning this hackathon is a thousand dollars and a shower, and the rules explicitly drop any requirement that your idea be economically viable. Twelve hours on Saturday, top teams invited to the afterparty.
Saturday, Sep 26, 2:00 PM - 5:00 PM
Devol Robotics presents IWM 1.0, a world model for contact-rich manipulation that predicts its own stiffness and damping to control the arm. Past sessions of this reading club drew researchers from Boston Dynamics, DeepMind and Physical Intelligence.
Saturday, Sep 26, 9:00 AM - 9:00 PM
Every team here needs at least one human and one AI co-founder, and the AI can hold any role from CEO to sales. Teams of two to four build a working product on Emergent by 9:00 that night.