Max Robotics — Global Service Robot Directory + US Certification

About

Pannag Sanketi is a leading researcher at the intersection of robotics and machine learning, whose work is fundamentally reshaping how robots learn and generalize in the real world. His primary contributions lie in developing large-scale, generalist robot policies and vision-language-action (VLA) models that transfer knowledge from Internet-scale data to physical robotic control. Sanketi is best known as a key contributor to the groundbreaking RT-1 and RT-2 models—the Robotics Transformer series—which have garnered over 800 combined citations and demonstrated that robots can leverage web knowledge for emergent semantic reasoning and zero-shot task execution. He has also been instrumental in creating foundational open-source resources like Octo and OpenVLA, as well as the DROID dataset (108 citations), a large-scale in-the-wild manipulation dataset that accelerates community-wide research. Beyond manipulation, Sanketi’s work on high-speed robotic table tennis (35+ citations) showcases his ability to tackle dynamic, real-time control challenges using model-free reinforcement learning. His research consistently bridges the gap between theoretical advances and practical, deployable systems, making him a pivotal figure in the push toward general-purpose robots that can learn, reason, and act in unstructured environments.