Richard Droste

Infrastructure Lead @FlexionBots | Previously @amazon, @UniofOxford, @ETH_en, etc.

[Flexion @FlexionAI]

We have been named the Hottest Robotics Startup at the TOP 100 Swiss Startup Awards.

Building general-purpose intelligence that can adapt to any robot requires exceptional people working across every layer.

Congratulations to the entire Flexion team for teaching robots how to think, move and adapt.

This is just the beginning.

#GeneralRobotIntelligence #SwissStartups

[Flexion @FlexionAI]

Historically, RL policies for robots have been trained in synthetic, untextured environments, limiting perceptive policies to depth images where the sim-to-real gap is manageable. RGB has always had more potential, but leveraging it to train policies in simulation remained an open problem.

Partnering with @NianticSpatial and @NVIDIARobotics, we built a pipeline that addresses exactly that. We can now scan a real deployment site with off-the-shelf hardware, reconstruct it into a photorealistic Gaussian splat, and run massively parallel RL training. The policies trained in our Gym environment then transfer zero-shot to the real robot and environments they were trained for. This enables faster deployment of more capable and robust policies for the end user.

The new resulting capabilities are a big step towards solving sim-to-real and also apply well beyond navigation. Read the full technical breakdown on our blog; link in the comments.

#HumanoidRobots #Flexion #NianticSpatial #NVIDIA

[Chris Paxton @chris_j_paxton]

This is really cool

[Flexion @FlexionAI]

"A parcel with snacks has been delivered for Flexion. Retrieve it using the stairs and come up using the elevator. Then unpack it and place the items into the empty drawer on the shelf in the snack area."

One instruction. No human operator. Everything that follows is autonomous.

Today we're introducing Reflect v1.0, our robotics intelligence platform for long-horizon work. From a single natural-language command, the robot understands the task, navigates a multi-floor building, calls elevators, handles doors, uses tools to unpack a box, and puts the items away. The biggest shift in v1.0 is that we use reinforcement learning across every layer, from low-level control to high-level reasoning.

Long-horizon autonomy is unforgiving. The robot must recover on its own when things don't go to plan because in the real world, they never do. Combining reasoning, perception, physical execution and runtime robustness into a single mission-capable system is the foundation required to solve humanoid autonomy.

Our team is just getting started.

#HumanoidRobots #Flexion

[Flexion @FlexionAI]

Thank you for an amazing 2025. Happy holidays, and see you in 2026!

[Flexion @FlexionAI]

In our latest video, our agent tidies up our office fully autonomously, starting from a simple user prompt.
No scripts. No pre-computed trajectories.

Continues in the thread.

[Flexion @FlexionAI]

We’ve raised $50 million in Series A funding from DST Global Partners, @nvidia (NVIDIA’s venture capital arm), @redalpine , @prosusventures , and @Moonfire_VC , following our $7.35M seed round from @frst_vc , @Moonfire_VC , and @redalpine just a few months earlier, to build the autonomy stack that makes humanoid robots adaptive, intelligent, and ready for real-world deployment at scale.

In less than a year, our team has shown that long-horizon whole-body humanoid control can scale across hardware and tasks by leveraging the power of simulation and reinforcement learning.

This funding will help us grow our team, scale our compute and robot fleets, and accelerate the commercialization of our autonomy stack with OEM partners globally.

You can find more details in the links shared in the comments.

[Ron Litman @RonLitman]

Announcing TiE: Text in Everything Workshop @eccvconf.
Call for papers is now open.
This workshop proposes The OOV-ST Challenge, an evaluation set of out-of-vocabulary (OOV) text-in-the-wild images. More info at https://t.co/LtyP50ueS2.

[Richard Droste @richard_droste]

@schlurry Congrats Lorenz and team, this is huge! 🎉

[arXiv Daily @Arxiv_Daily]

A Dual Adversarial Calibration Framework for Automatic Fetal Brain Biometry
https://t.co/Mapy9wmQDw
by Yuan Gao et al. including @richard_droste
#Statistics #Estimator

[Nuffield Dept of Women's & Reproductive Health @Ox_wrh]

Congrats to @ldrukker (Papageorghiou group). His new paper in @SpringerNature and @SciReports considers obstetric ultrasound as data science: assessing sonographer gaze patters, voice & transducer motion in routine ultrasound scanning.

Read more here➡️https://t.co/O8RfjqQT9M

[Richard Droste @richard_droste]

@sei134340 Great to hear that it’s helpful!

[Robotic Systems Lab @leggedrobotics]

Learning a navigation policy in dynamic environments in 10 minutes and deploying it sim-to-real is not as hard as it sounds.
See our RA-L paper https://t.co/oSJy8JMDfH with @HoellerDavid, @schlurry, Farbod Farshidian, Marco Hutter, https://t.co/EALPqsMcPn

⬇️ Key ingredients ⬇️

[Noble Lab @NobleLabOxford]

We're looking for a PhD student to work on multimodal learning and analysis for healthcare - funded - for more details see https://t.co/Vcio9YG4oJ

[Alfredo Canziani @alfcnz]

This just started! You'll find me here all day 😜

[Anirban Mukhopadhyay @anirbanakash]

"What is Wrong with Continual Learning in Medical Image Segmentation?"
With this slightly provocative title our effort worth more than a year goes online: https://t.co/6JcqOHCwSx

[Richard Droste @richard_droste]

@AtoAndyKing @ana_namburete Very interesting work indeed! Unfortunately the shorturl link doesn't work for me (iOS app and firefox/chrome) so I'll leave this link here in case others have this issue: https://t.co/pQxwlGYjG7

[Noble Lab @NobleLabOxford]

We're recruiting for a Translational Imaging Research Software Engineer!

Find out more: https://t.co/QbTNSuVmHX

Closing date October 28th

[Richard Droste @richard_droste]

@KordingLab This how the MICCAI 2020 virtual conference handles this:
"Instead of selecting a small percentage of papers for a single track oral session, this year every author will have the opportunity to participate in a short parallel oral session."

[Richard Droste @richard_droste]

@permutans Good point. On second thoughts it is probably to change the branch name to "master" in case someone changed the default branch name of their local git because "git branch -M master" is treated like "git branch -M <current-name> master".