Broadcast · Institute TV

Institute TV.

The Institute's research and teaching, narrated — a broadcast layer over everything that already runs on this site. Thirty-six episodes, rendered on-device by our own pipeline and published free. Every film points back at something you can open, drive, or read.

▶ Channel trailer · one minute of what the Institute already runs

Begin here

Start here

What the Institute is, in a minute — and why it's your tomorrow.

Why Physical AI — and why it's your tomorrow

Yesterday intelligence lived behind glass; today it steps into the world; tomorrow it gets rebuilt — and the door…

The Institute for Physical AI — channel trailer

One minute of what the Institute already runs: live robot sims, courses you drive, and the Atlas of the field —…

One idea, explained

Teaching shorts

A single concept from the courses, made concrete in a few minutes.

How a robot learns to walk — reinforcement learning, explained

You don't program every joint. You reward the robot for moving forward and staying up, and it discovers the how —…

Teach a robot with words — Vision-Language-Action (VLA), explained

Say “pick up the red block” and the robot sees the scene, matches your words to the object, and turns it into…

Show it, don't program it — imitation learning, explained

The fastest way to teach a robot a skill often isn't code or reward — it's demonstration. Show it a few times and…

How a robot sees — perception and occupancy, explained

A robot can't act on a flat photo. It rebuilds the scene as a model of space: what's free to move through, what's…

Let the compiler catch it first — Rust's borrow checker for robots

In Rust the borrow checker refuses to compile code that misuses ownership — the bug is caught at your desk, before…

Alongside the courses

Course companions

A full lesson, watched end to end.

A full Rust lesson, start to finish — ownership & the borrow checker

A whole lesson end-to-end: open the real bench, hit the borrow-checker error, read it, fix it, and watch the rover…

The research, narrated

Inside the labs

Every research topic, told as a short film — the same work that ships as a white paper you can run.

Can you trust a swarm? — deterministic autonomy

143 drones, one WGSL solver, stepping bit-for-bit identically on any GPU. Reproducible autonomy you can verify,…

Why plugging things in is hard — compliant manipulation

Command an exact position and it jams; command force and the part slides down the chamfer and seats itself.…

A world model that predicts — Spatial AI

The world held as a living field of Gaussian splats that forecasts where it will be, a moment ahead. See it and…

How a robot feels — vision-based touch

A fingertip that sees touch: a soft skin over a camera. From how light and shadow shift, it reconstructs the shape…

One world, many eyes — OmniSense

Every camera and viewpoint fused into one shared, resolved volume of space. Where one sensor is blind, another…

Proving a robot won't fall — the Lyapunov certificate

Don't just test a controller — prove it. Interval branch-and-bound certifies stability across the whole region. A…

Print the muscles too — the printed body

Every joint is one axial-flux actuator, re-sliced per joint. Nine of ten subsystems already print; only the drive…

What if AI stopped multiplying? — ternary compute

Multiplication is where most of the energy goes. Ternary math replaces it with something a chip can almost do for…

Why a hand doesn't drop things — grasp stability

You squeeze just enough. Sense the start of a slip and tighten only as much as you must. Force closure, from touch.

A sensing fabric you can't spoof — Spatial RF

Fuse six radio bands, each weighted by how hard it is to fake. A real event corroborates across all of them; a…

The bottleneck is people — the Diffusion Layer

The skill to design silicon spreads like any technology — slowest for the deep, tacit expertise. Model the levers…

The reproducibility you can afford — energy-native compute

Push a computer to use less energy and it gets noisy — and noisy means you can't reproduce the answer. There's a…

One fluid, three currents — microfluidic co-optimization

Power, heat, and compute usually mean three systems. What if one fluid network carried charge, heat, and…

Sampling is the compute — thermodynamic Physical AI

Some of the hardest AI problems are about probability — sampling. Nature already samples, for free, through heat.…

The world, as a graph — hyperdb

Every entity a node, every relationship an edge, and each node carries a vector. One engine that follows the links…

Air-traffic control for a thousand drones — volume operations

A live operations twin of a city's low-altitude airspace: real corridors, live multi-band traffic, and strategic…

A skin that pays twice — persistent aerial platforms

A high-altitude aircraft that never lands: its metasurface skin harvests energy AND shapes its radar signature.…

Every way to compute — the Compute Atlas

47 methods across 9 families, dated from 1925 to now — optical, neuromorphic, thermodynamic, quantum. Not moats;…

Catching a dead satellite — Physical AI for space logistics

Moving mass through space is a velocity budget. The modes that pay it down — a momentum-exchange tether catch, a…

Sixty seconds

Shorts

One idea, one breath. Vertical, fast, made to share.

Can you trust a swarm? #Shorts

A hundred drones, as one. Run it twice — same result? Bit-for-bit, on any GPU.

Print a robot's muscles? #Shorts

3D-print a robot's body, sure. But its motors? Nine of ten parts already print.

Prove a robot won't fall #Shorts

Don't test it — prove it. Green means mathematically certified.

How a robot learns to walk #Shorts

You don't program it. You reward it — and it figures out the rest.

Teach a robot with words #Shorts

Tell it, in plain words. It sees, and it acts. Vision-Language-Action.

Show it, don't program it #Shorts

Teach a robot a new skill by showing it — and it learns to copy you.

How a robot sees #Shorts

Not a photo — a model of space it can move through. That's perception.

The compiler catches it first #Shorts

A bug in robot code, caught before the robot ever moves. Rust's borrow checker.

Catching a tumbling satellite #Shorts

A dead satellite won't hold still. The chaser estimates its tumble, holds a certified corridor, and latches — on…

The channel

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