Chapters
11 groups we could verify are meeting right now, from a weekly Saturday club in San Francisco to lab seminars that publish their reading lists. 7 cities with serious robotics labs have nothing public at all.
Plotted by longitude, so you can find the room that is awake when you are. ● a robotics group meets here (paper club, lab seminar or community night) · ○ no club we could verify · faded: dormant or archived
San Francisco, United States · Weekly, Saturdays 2:00–5:00 PM PT
One invited keynote (30–60 min) plus an open-floor roundtable where anyone can spotlight a paper for 10–20 minutes. Pre-readings are published on the event page in advance.
Travels to major conferences: CVPR Denver, SIGGRAPH LA, ICML Seoul, IROS Pittsburgh, plus Stanford and Beijing editions.
Verified 2026-08-28 · source
Austin, United States · One paper every two weeks (Spring 2026 term)
45-minute presentation plus 15 minutes of Q&A, one presenter per session. Spring 2026 theme is robot learning × foundation models; papers drawn from CoRL, RSS and ICLR.
Public schedule spreadsheet lists upcoming presenters and papers.
Verified 2026-08-28 · source
Salt Lake City, United States · Termly (Summer 2026 round listed)
Publishes explicit presenter guidelines: the presenter must state the paper's 3–5 core assumptions out loud before discussing results.
Coordinated through the #robotics-reading-group Slack channel.
Verified 2026-08-28 · source
Montreal, Canada · Fridays 12:00 PM, hybrid (in person + Zoom)
Hard rule: a presented paper must include a real or simulated robot deployment. Schedule and presenter rota live in the repo.
Meets in Auditorium 2, building 6650 at Mila; remote link on the Mila calendar.
Verified 2026-08-28 · source
Cambridge, MA, United States · Weekly rounds, theme chosen by group vote
Runs in themed rounds rather than one-off papers: the group votes a theme, then spends several weeks on papers, textbook chapters and background around it.
Recent rounds include memory, energy and test-time adaptation.
Verified 2026-08-28 · source
Berlin, Germany · Weekly, Mondays
General ML/AI rather than robotics-only, but consistently covers embodied and multimodal work. Open to the Berlin AI community.
Hosted in person at the Merantix AI Campus.
Verified 2026-08-28 · source
Online · Regular online meetings
Reinforcement learning focus. Participants are expected to have read the paper beforehand, and the group regularly hosts the paper's own authors as guest speakers.
Fully online and open to anyone; accepts requests to present your own work.
Verified 2026-08-28 · source
New York, United States · Recurring, Luma-scheduled
General AI research rather than robotics-only. Papers are announced ahead of each session.
Robotics and embodied AI papers appear regularly but are not the sole focus.
Verified 2026-08-28 · source
San Francisco, United States · Recurring, Luma-scheduled
Dinner-format discussion around three announced papers; attendees are asked to read all three in advance.
Themed sessions; robotics appears alongside generative media and agents.
Verified 2026-08-28 · source
Zurich, Switzerland · Quarterly, capped at 250 people
Panel and networking rather than paper presentations. Listed here because it is the gathering point for the Zurich robotics research community · ETH RSL, UZH RPG, the ETH AI Center and the RAI Institute all show up.
Registration is curated, not automatic. Zurich has no dedicated robotics paper club yet.
Verified 2026-08-28 · source
Zurich, Switzerland · Wednesday evenings, roughly every three weeks
Ten-minute talks from local researchers presenting their own work, mixed with five-minute spotlights on recent papers participants found interesting. Spots are limited, and anyone who has presented before gets preferred access · which is a neat way of making the presenting rule bite.
Started because robot learning in Zurich was scattered: academia, big tech and startups all pushing the field forward, rarely in the same room.
Verified 2026-08-28 · source
Pulled from the clubs' own event pages.
We looked for a public robotics reading club in each of these and did not find one. If you know otherwise, correct us. If you do not, this is your opening.
Israel
Dense robotics and computer-vision talent across Technion, TAU, Weizmann and the defence-adjacent autonomy scene, but no public robotics paper club we could verify.
Singapore
NUS runs several robot-learning labs (LEMA, MARMoT, the new MAGIC Lab) and Lorong AI runs a general AI community, but no open robotics paper club is publicly listed.
United Kingdom
Google DeepMind, Imperial and UCL robotics groups in one city, with no open cross-institution robotics reading group listed.
Japan
Deep industrial robotics base plus strong academic labs; the reading-club format has not surfaced publicly in English.
India
Large and fast-growing applied-ML population with robotics teams at several global R&D centres.
South Korea
Saturday Robotics ran a private lunch here during ICML 2026, which suggests demand without a standing local chapter.
France
Meta FAIR Paris, Inria and a growing humanoid startup cluster, with no open robotics paper club listed.
Kept in the index because their published reading lists are still a good source of papers, and because a dormant group is easier to restart than to found.
Pittsburgh, United States · ·
Human-robot interaction focus. The lab's own page states the group is no longer active.
Last listed sessions are from Summer 2024. Archive of past papers is still online and worth mining.
Verified 2026-08-28 · source
Gainesville, United States · Termly
Publishes a full per-term reading list, which is a useful record even between active rounds.
Most recent listed round is Summer 2025; no 2026 schedule published yet.
Verified 2026-08-28 · source