Intelligence that has a body.
Penn Embodied AI is a student-run collective at the University of Pennsylvania building robots that perceive, learn, and act in the physical world.
A community that takes hardware seriously.
Penn Embodied AI brings together undergraduate and graduate students from across engineering, computer science, and beyond to study and build embodied intelligence — from humanoid locomotion and dexterous manipulation to sim-to-real reinforcement learning and tactile sensing.
We meet to read papers, run experiments on real and simulated robots, share our work, and host the researchers pushing the field forward. Our goal is to give students a hands-on path into robotics research and to connect Penn's talent with the labs, companies, and ideas shaping embodied AI. No prior robotics experience required — only curiosity and the willingness to build.
The problems we care about.
Humanoid locomotion
Bipedal walking, balance, and whole-body control — getting full-body robots to move robustly in the real world.
Dexterous manipulation
Hands and grippers that grasp, reorient, and use tools with precision and stability.
Sim-to-real RL
Training control policies in simulation and transferring them onto physical hardware that actually holds up.
Tactile & force sensing
Giving robots a sense of touch — the contact and force data that vision alone can never capture.
Vision-language-action
Generalist models that connect perception and language directly to physical action.
Perception & world models
Helping robots build an internal model of their surroundings so they can plan and act.
What being a member looks like.
Paper reading groups
Work through the field's key results together, from classic control to the latest VLA papers.
Build & sim nights
Hands-on sessions in MuJoCo, Isaac Lab, and on real hardware.
Research projects
Small teams take an idea from simulation to a working demo over a semester.
Guest talks
Researchers and founders share what they're building and how they got there.
Conference trips
Travel together to robotics venues like IROS and CoRL.
Lab connections
Help members find their footing inside Penn's robotics labs.
One of the strongest robotics ecosystems anywhere.
Penn is home to one of the world's leading robotics and perception research centers.
Field-defining robotics companies that began as Penn research.
From coursework and labs to startups — and a club to help you navigate it.
Builders and researchers of every level are welcome.
Whether you've trained policies on real robots or you've never touched a servo, there's a place for you here. Come build with us.