Top Robotics & Physical AI Researchers (2026)

Professor (EECS), UC Berkeley · Amazon Scholar; co-leads Frontier AI & Robotics, heads AGI LLM efforts, Amazon

PhD · Stanford University — Andrew Ng

Berkeley robotics/deep RL professor, BAIR co-director; Covariant co-founder; pioneer of robot learning

Pioneer of deep RL and imitation learning; co-founder of Covariant. Recent work includes DreamDojo, a generalist robot world model trained on 44k hours of human video, and humanoid parkour on real robots.

Co-founder & CEO, Robot Era · Assistant Professor, Tsinghua University (IIIS)

PhD · UC Berkeley — Masayoshi Tomizuka (Mechanical Systems Control Lab)

Founder/CEO of humanoid startup Robot Era (STAR1, XHand, ERA-42); Tsinghua IIIS roboticist in RL & contact-rich manipulation

Founder of Robot Era and faculty at Tsinghua IIIS; leads RL-based humanoid locomotion and sim-to-real, plus VLA architecture work (BagelVLA, VLM4VLA).

Assistant Professor, Stanford University · Co-founder, Physical Intelligence

PhD · UC Berkeley — Pieter Abbeel & Sergey Levine (BAIR)

Pioneer of meta-learning (MAML) and robot imitation learning; Stanford professor and Physical Intelligence co-founder

Pioneer of meta-learning and a co-founder of Physical Intelligence. Co-author of pi-0.6 (RL self-improvement for VLAs that fold laundry and make espresso in real homes) and Cosmos Policy, which fine-tunes a video model into a SOTA robot policy.

Co-founder & CEO, Physical Intelligence

PhD · University of Southern California (USC) — Gaurav Sukhatme (Robotic Embedded Systems Lab)

Co-founder and CEO of Physical Intelligence; robot learning researcher (ex-Google DeepMind, Stanford adjunct)

CEO and co-founder of Physical Intelligence, building the pi-series VLA foundation models now deployed commercially for laundry folding and packaging. Long-time leader in cross-embodiment robot learning.

Associate Professor (EECS), UC Berkeley · Co-founder, Physical Intelligence

PhD · Stanford University — Vladlen Koltun (advisor); co-advised by Patrick Hanrahan

Deep RL and robot learning; Physical Intelligence co-founder; pi0/RT-2 robot foundation models

The most-cited researcher in modern robot learning. Drove the shift to large-scale, data-driven robot control and co-founded Physical Intelligence; recent work includes steerable and asynchronous VLA policies for embodied reasoning.

Co-founder & CEO, Skild AI · Raj Reddy Associate Professor of Robotics, Carnegie Mellon University

PhD · UC Berkeley — Alexei (Alyosha) Efros & Trevor Darrell (BAIR)

Skild AI co-founder/CEO; CMU robotics professor; curiosity-driven exploration and sim-to-real robot learning

CEO of Skild AI and originator of curiosity-driven learning. Drives "omni-bodied" learning from human video and object-centric world models (Latent Particle World Models) for general manipulation.

Tenure-track Assistant Professor, Peking University (CFCS / EPIC Lab) · Founder & CTO, Galbot

PhD · Stanford University — Leonidas J. Guibas (Geometric Computing Group)

PKU CFCS / EPIC Lab; embodied AI & 3D vision; known for category-level 6D pose (NOCS) and dexterous grasping; founder/CTO of Galbot

Leads embodied AI and dexterous manipulation at Peking University; built LDA-1B, a billion-parameter robot foundation model trained on 30k hours of embodied data.

Co-founder & CEO, Sunday Robotics

PhD · Stanford University (incomplete — left PhD in 2024) — Chelsea Finn (IRIS Lab); also part-time at Google DeepMind

Creator of ALOHA / ACT low-cost bimanual robot learning; co-founder & CEO of Sunday Robotics (Memo home robot)

CEO of Sunday Robotics and first author of ACT / ALOHA, the low-cost bimanual teleoperation and imitation-learning system that became a standard for dexterous manipulation research.

Co-founder & CTO, Sunday Robotics

PhD · Columbia University — Shuran Song

Co-founder & CTO of Sunday Robotics (Memo home robot); created Diffusion Policy and the UMI gripper

CTO of Sunday Robotics and first author of Diffusion Policy and UMI (Universal Manipulation Interface), two of the most widely adopted methods in robot imitation learning.

Tenured Associate Professor, School of CS / Center on Frontiers of Computing Studies; leads PKU-AgiBot Lab, Peking University

PhD · Imperial College London — Yike Guo

Peking University prof; embodied AI and generalizable robotic manipulation; leads PKU-AgiBot Lab

Professor of Computer Science & Engineering, University of Washington · Senior Director of Robotics Research, Allen Institute for AI (Ai2)

PhD · University of Bonn — Computer Science (Armin B. Cremers' group)

Probabilistic robotics, particle filters, grasping/pose estimation; now leads robot foundation models at Ai2

Leads robotics research at NVIDIA and UW; recent work on 3D point-flow world models (PointWorld) and test-time-compute scaling for VLAs.

Co-founder & President, Skild AI · Professor, Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University

PhD · University of Maryland, College Park — Larry Davis

CMU robotics prof and Skild AI co-founder/president; self-supervised learning and large-scale robot learning

Co-founder, Physical Intelligence

PhD · Stanford University — Marco Pavone (Autonomous Systems Lab), Aeronautics & Astronautics

Co-founder of Physical Intelligence; ex-Google Brain/DeepMind; LLM-grounded robotics (SayCan, Code as Policies)

Arthur J. Chick Professor of EECS, UC Berkeley · VP & Distinguished Scientist, Amazon FAR (Frontier AI & Robotics)

PhD · Stanford University — Thomas Binford's robotics/vision group

Computer vision pioneer (normalized cuts, R-CNN, shape contexts); now leads robotics research at Amazon FAR

One of the most influential computer-vision researchers, now driving vision-for-robotics and generalist robot world models at UC Berkeley and NVIDIA.

Lead Research Scientist, Robot Learning & Foundation Models, Microsoft Research

PhD · University of Freiburg — Wolfram Burgard

Robot learning and internet-scale foundation models; vision-language-action models (Octo, CALVIN)

Member of Technical Staff, Physical Intelligence

PhD · University of Southern California (USC) — Joseph Lim (CLVR Lab)

Robot foundation models & large-scale datasets; co-led Open X-Embodiment, OpenVLA, DROID, Octo

Lead contributor to OpenVLA, DROID, and FAST action tokenization — core open-source building blocks for cross-embodiment vision-language-action models.

Roboticist, Meta Superintelligence Labs · Assistant Professor of Computer Science, New York University

PhD · Carnegie Mellon University — Abhinav Gupta

Robot-learning researcher; large-scale self-supervised grasping and affordable open-source robots; co-founded ARI (acq. Meta)

Leads dexterous-manipulation research at NYU, advancing self-supervised and large-scale robot learning.

Associate Professor, Khoury College of Computer Sciences, Northeastern University

PhD · University of Massachusetts Amherst — Autonomous Learning Laboratory (Andrew Barto / Roderic Grupen)

Northeastern roboticist; equivariant models for sample-efficient robot manipulation (also affiliated with RAI Institute)

Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering (and Computer Science, by courtesy); Director, Robotics and Embodied AI Lab (REAL), Stanford University

PhD · Princeton University — Thomas Funkhouser (Princeton Vision & Robotics Group)

Leads Stanford REAL Lab; co-creator of Diffusion Policy and UMI for visuomotor robot learning

Leads 3D perception and manipulation research at Stanford; prolific contributor to learned manipulation and scene understanding.

Toyota Professor, EECS / MechE / AeroAstro; member of CSAIL, Massachusetts Institute of Technology · Senior Vice President of Large Behavior Models, Toyota Research Institute

PhD · Massachusetts Institute of Technology — MIT (Computational Cognitive Science / Sebastian Seung)

MIT professor & TRI SVP of Large Behavior Models; creator of Drake; LBMs for dexterous manipulation

Leader in robot control and underactuated systems at MIT / Toyota Research Institute; creator of the Drake simulation and the LBM/Diffusion-Policy manipulation line.

Cheryl and John Neerhout, Jr. Distinguished Professor of Mechanical Engineering, UC Berkeley

PhD · Massachusetts Institute of Technology — Mechanical Engineering (control systems)

Control theorist directing the Mechanical Systems Control (MSC) Lab; motion/robot control, mechatronics, autonomous driving

Professor, Department of Automation; Director, Intelligent Robotics and Machine Vision (IRMV) Lab, Shanghai Jiao Tong University

PhD · Chinese University of Hong Kong — Department of Automation & Computer-Aided Engineering, CUHK

SJTU IRMV Lab director; deep learning for LiDAR odometry, visual servoing, and embodied AI robotics

Co-founder & Chief Scientist, Generalist AI

PhD · Princeton University — Thomas Funkhouser

Ex-Google DeepMind roboticist; co-founder of Generalist AI; Transporter Networks, SayCan, Code as Policies

Associate Professor of Computer Science, University of Texas at Austin · Director & Distinguished Research Scientist (co-leads GEAR), NVIDIA Research

PhD · Stanford University — Fei-Fei Li & Silvio Savarese (Stanford Vision Lab)

UT Austin prof and NVIDIA GEAR co-lead; generalist robot learning, creator of robosuite, Eureka

Leads robot learning and simulation at UT Austin / NVIDIA; co-author of DreamZero, a 14B video-diffusion world model doing real-time closed-loop robot control.

Research Scientist, Physical Intelligence · PhD student, UC Berkeley

PhD · UC Berkeley — RAIL / BAIR (Sergey Levine)

Lead author of pi0 (π0) vision-language-action flow model; co-led Octo generalist robot policy

First author of pi-0, Physical Intelligence's flagship vision-language-action foundation model.

PhD student, Stanford University

Built Mobile ALOHA and HumanPlus; learning-based legged locomotion and whole-body humanoid manipulation

First author of HumanPlus (CoRL 2024), enabling humanoids to learn by shadowing human motion.

Researcher / Engineer, RobotEra

PhD · Tsinghua University — Jianyu Chen (Shanghai Qi Zhi Institute / Tsinghua)

RobotEra researcher behind Humanoid-Gym and sim-to-real humanoid locomotion (DWL)

First author of the Denoising World Model work (RSS 2024 Outstanding Paper) for humanoid locomotion; co-founder at RobotEra.

Co-founder & CTO, CollectedAI · PhD candidate, Stanford University

PhD · Stanford University — IRIS Lab (Chelsea Finn)

Lead author of DROID large-scale in-the-wild robot manipulation dataset; co-founder/CTO of CollectedAI

First author of DROID (RSS 2024), the largest in-the-wild robot manipulation dataset.

PhD student (Finn/Liang labs), Stanford University

Lead author of OpenVLA, an open-source vision-language-action model for robot control

First author of OpenVLA, the open-source 7B vision-language-action model that became a community standard.

Founding Researcher / Member of Technical Staff, Physical Intelligence

PhD · Stanford University — Chelsea Finn & Silvio Savarese (Stanford AI Lab / IRIS)

Founding researcher at Physical Intelligence; scaling robot learning via VLA foundation models (R3M, pi0)

Key contributor to Physical Intelligence's foundation models (R3M, pi-0) for visual representation and robot control.

Postdoctoral Researcher, UC Berkeley (BAIR)

PhD · New York University (Courant Institute) — Lerrel Pinto (NYU Robot Learning Lab)

Robot learning from demonstrations; Behavior Transformers and Dobb-E for household robot manipulation

Known for DynaMem, Behavior Transformers. CoRL workshop best paper, prolific in robot learning

Research Scientist, Physical Intelligence · PhD student, UC Berkeley

PhD · UC Berkeley — RAIL / BAIR (Sergey Levine)

Berkeley robot-learning researcher; FAST action tokenization for high-frequency generalist VLA policies

Co-first author of FAST, an action-tokenization scheme that made autoregressive VLAs dramatically faster to train.