Research
Applied RL, from simulation to a real robot on the bench.
Pods form around client problems. The center of gravity is robotics.
Focus areas
Where we point the lab.
Robot learning
Imitation, sim-to-real and offline RL on a low-cost SO-101 arm.
How research runs
Read. Build. Publish.
Reading group
Weekly. One paper, one presenter.
Research pods
Formed around a client problem or a release.
Capstones to papers
DeCal projects continue as workshop papers.
Open source
Envs on the Hub, labs on GitHub.
Berkeley labs we learn from
Standing on the shoulders of BAIR.
RAIL
Sergey Levine
Offline RL, robot learning
Robot Learning Lab
Pieter Abbeel
Simulation, RL algorithms
AUTOLab
Ken Goldberg
Manipulation, data
InterACT
Anca Dragan
Human-robot interaction, RLHF
Sky Computing Lab
Ion Stoica
Agent evals, LLM infra
CHAI
Stuart Russell
Alignment, RL safety
Education pipeline
Reinforcement Learning in Practice
Spring 2027 · 2 units · P/NP · cap 40
From MDPs to agents in 15 weeks. Every module ends in working code.
Open workshops
Your first RL env
Train an LLM with RL in 90 minutes
Tasks, rubrics and gold answers (no code)
Robot arm from scratch
Sim setup: MuJoCo, Isaac Lab, Genesis
Syllabus · 15 weeks
MDPs, Bellman equations, Q-learning
DQN, policy gradients, PPO from scratch
Continuous control and reward hacking
RLHF, DPO, RLVR: build an env, run GRPO
Robot learning, offline RL, world models
How labs actually do RL (guest lecture)
Project sprint and demo day
Come do research that ships.
Build-track members join a pod in their first semester.