Doug Tilley

Founder @ Asim (YC F26)

Working on Robot Safety and Human-Robot Interaction.

PhD candidate in ART-AI at the University of Bath. (3x Doctoral Award)

[Binghao Huang ✈️ CoRL @binghao_huang]

1/5 FlexiTac has been accepted to the CoRL 2026 Demo Track, and today we’re releasing FlexiTac-Gen! 🧵

Try it: https://t.co/A1HNclEi4U

Over the past two years, we’ve received many requests to customize FlexiTac for different robots. With help from AI agents, we built a tool that makes it easy to design your own sensor and export the files for fabrication.

A simple piece of tactile hardware to help move your research forward. See you at CoRL!

[Doug Tilley @DougTilley7]

@AssimMAddous @tristanlecourt @MaelicN @raflaf_ @asim_group @ycombinator The best, just for you 50% off your next robot benchmark

[Tristan Lecourtois @tristanlecourt]

We’re launching Asim (YC F26) to help robotics teams find failures before deployment.

A robot completes a task perfectly. Can it handle an unfamiliar object, reason about how parts fit together, or recover when an interaction goes wrong?

We’re building standardized benchmarks for physical intelligence. We test real robots through repeatable scenarios that probe the capabilities behind successful actions: spatial reasoning, understanding physical interactions, dexterous manipulation and adaptation.

Teams can identify where performance breaks down, get actionable engineering feedback and measure whether the next software update actually improves it.

Building robots? Let’s put them to the test → https://t.co/yVIWlWoYln

Asim. Benchmarking physical intelligence.

[Doug Tilley @DougTilley7]

@chris_j_paxton The more companies trying to help solve evals the better! Especially real world evals...

[Robert Scoble @Scobleizer]

People far smarter than me are on the job of building robots.

He runs @SkildAI.

Is getting more out of AI to run robots than most others.

So I pay attention when he points out breakthroughs.

[Runtime @runtimesi]

Robots shouldn't need to be fine-tuned for every new task.

Introducing Runtime (YC F26). We're reimagining robot policies: explore in simulation, then act in the real world.

Watch it thread a rope.

No fine-tuning. No teleoperation.

[Doug Tilley @DougTilley7]

@IliaLarchenko More real world evals is always needed!

[Doug Tilley @DougTilley7]

@YiruHelenWang Amazing work! Robotics evals in the physical world are hard!

[Doug Tilley @DougTilley7]

@kul @ycombinator @GetBlinka True! Great to see this being done.

[Doug Tilley @DougTilley7]

This is a great initiative!

Always great to see more work going into evals and testing!

[RoboColosseum @RoboColosseum]

Introducing RoboColosseum

An open robot eval initiative by @huggingface @BitRobotNetwork @eaic_sg @DJiafei

Access:
- 100+ robots (@UnitreeRobotics G1s, @LeRobotHF SO-101s, YAMs, Franka and more)
- 140+ in-the-wild scenes
- Open rollout data
- 10,000 FREE eval hrs

Thread ↓

[RoboColosseum @RoboColosseum]

Introducing RoboColosseum

An open robot eval initiative by @huggingface @BitRobotNetwork @eaic_sg @DJiafei

Access:
- 100+ robots (@UnitreeRobotics G1s, @LeRobotHF SO-101s, YAMs, Franka and more)
- 140+ in-the-wild scenes
- Open rollout data
- 10,000 FREE eval hrs

Thread ↓

[Doug Tilley @DougTilley7]

Chasing better physics solvers and new simulation frameworks will get us 90% of the way there, but the only real test of a robot's capabilities, and safety, is in the physical world.

​As this survey by @EliJalbout et al. points out, policies love to exploit simulator corner cases that become dangerous the second they touch real hardware: https://t.co/gCRJbhO9Ir

[Doug Tilley @DougTilley7]

Robotics could become an $8T market by 2035.

One serious accident could shake public trust and slow adoption across the industry.

The International Robot Safety Conference is on the next 3 days, Nov 3–5. Getting safety right is how we make that future possible.

[asim (YC F26) @asim_group]

See you on Thursday 👀

[Doug Tilley @DougTilley7]

"The scores looked fine. The traces didn't."

​Had a great time speaking at the Bench Summit! With agentic robotics being such a hot topic right now (distinct from WAMs, VLAs, or pure RL), it’s awesome to see how much energy the community is putting into evaluating these systems and opening them up to the broader public.

​Top-line scores are a great start, but the most exciting insights are hiding in the execution traces. Digging into the traces together is how we turn benchmark success into real-world reliability. Always read your traces!

The picture shown is a recreation of one of the slides presented at the opening.

[Doug Tilley @DougTilley7]

@arjungru This is awesome, we've been refining something similar at @asim_group

[Tristan Lecourtois @tristanlecourt]

ohh, spotted this on my way this morning 👀 Looks interesting!

[Doug Tilley @DougTilley7]

@RamV2003 @kaggle @GoogleDeepMind @zapier @asim_group See you there!

[Doug Tilley @DougTilley7]

This Wednesday I’m speaking at Bench Summit (@kaggle , @GoogleDeepMind & @zapier) about physical robot evals.

What can we learn from LLM/VLM benchmarks, and what do success rates miss?

I’ll share our perspective at @asim_group . Come say hi!

[Sam Padilla @theSamPadilla]

@_varunnair and I spent the last few weeks mapping the robotics industry.

230+ companies across the stack: data, simulation, models, robots, hardware, and deployment.

Missing someone or got something wrong?
Check it out and let us know at:
https://t.co/89jhGApCet

[Doug Tilley @DougTilley7]

@tristanlecourt, @MaelicN, @raflaf_

https://t.co/AaUk9hupgX