Robotics Center Research Awards

Overview

The Robotics Center Research Awards support researchers in academia and industry working on open problems in robotics and robot learning, especially work that depends on experiments with physical robots. Awards are made as hardware credits.

The 2026 call is open from October to December. Proposals are reviewed on a rolling basis while the call is open, so we encourage early submission.

Award

Each award is a grant of hardware credits, sized to the scope of the proposal. Credits cover Robotics Center hardware and robot time, including robot arms, dexterous hands, grippers, sensors and teleoperation equipment, delivered to the recipient's lab or used at the Robotics Center lab in San Francisco.

Award recipients also receive technical support and a point of contact on the Robotics Center research team.

Research areas

We invite proposals in, but not limited to, the following areas:

• Cross-embodiment learning. Policies and representations that transfer across robot bodies, and the study of what fails to transfer.
• Dexterous manipulation. Multi-fingered hands, in-hand manipulation and contact-rich tasks.
• Agentic robots. Language and vision-language model agents that perceive, plan and act on physical robots.
• Vision-language-action and world models. Generalist policies and learned world models, evaluated on real hardware.
• Learning from real-world interaction. Reinforcement learning, online adaptation and failure recovery on physical robots.
• Evaluation methodology. Benchmarks, protocols, metrics and automated judging for real-robot evaluation.

Proposals in other areas of robotics are welcome; please specify the research area in your application.

Eligibility

• Faculty and research scientists at universities and non-profit research institutions, in any country.
• Postdoctoral researchers and PhD students may apply with a faculty advisor named on the proposal.
• Researchers at company research labs, applying on behalf of their lab.

Proposal requirements

Submit a single PDF of no more than four pages, excluding references and biographies, containing:

1. Title, principal investigator and institution.
2. Abstract of no more than 300 words.
3. Research description: objectives, technical approach and significance.
4. Experimental plan and hardware request: the tasks, experiments and metrics you intend to run, and an itemised list of the hardware and robot time requested to run them, with a justification for each item.
5. Timeline and milestones.
6. Expected outputs: publications, code, datasets or benchmarks.
7. Biography of the principal investigator, up to one page.

Review process and criteria

Proposals are reviewed by the Robotics Center research team as they are received. Applicants may be invited to a short meeting before a decision is made. Proposals are evaluated on:

• Scientific merit and originality;
• Potential impact on robotics research and real-world systems;
• Feasibility of the plan and qualifications of the team;
• Justification of the hardware and credits requested; and
• Commitment to sharing results with the research community.

Terms

• Award recipients retain ownership of their research results. Recipients are encouraged to publish their findings and release code and data where possible.
• Publications, code and data resulting from an award must acknowledge support from the Robotics Center Research Awards.
• Robotics Center may describe funded projects and cite their published results.
• Recipients provide a brief summary of results at the end of the project.
• Awards are made at the discretion of Robotics Center and are subject to a written award agreement.

How to apply

Complete the form below and link your proposal PDF. Questions about the program may be sent to contact@roboticscenter.ai.