David Watkins - Principal Research Lead

I’m a Principal Research Lead at the RAI Institute (formerly Boston Dynamics AI Institute), where I invent systems that enable robots to learn from multimodal sensory data.

What I’ve built:

• Handheld force-based data collection for robot training, capturing force, vision, and proprioception for in-the-wild demonstrations
• Video prediction for robot policies using internet-scale video as a prior (early 2023, before the wave)
• Multimodal architectures combining novel sensors with internet-scale priors for improved behavioral execution
• Gradient-free RL enabling online learning with non-differentiable semantic functions (U.S. Patent pending)

I believe robots require multimodal sensory data from online learning systems that co-exist with humans, updating reward and policy simultaneously. Getting there requires hardware/software co-optimization through multidisciplinary teams—which is why I’ve built two research teams (40 people) to scale these innovations.

I write about robotics and embodied AI at whattotelltherobot.com with Stefanie Tellex, and we’re co-authoring “Elephants Don’t Write Sonnets” (MIT Press 2026). I recently co-organized the New England Manipulation Symposium (NEMS) 2025 at MIT.

Previously, I completed my Ph.D. at the Columbia Robotics Lab under Prof. Peter Allen, where my dissertation introduced novel approaches for mobile manipulation without runtime localization (IROS 2022 Best Paper Finalist). I’ve also been a CEO/Co-founder (Odefi), Research Fellow at the Army Research Lab, and won 1st place at the MineRL BASALT Competition (NeurIPS 2021).

More information is available in my curriculum vitae or my resume.