Cambrian Night #1: against humanoids.

530 million years ago, evolution tried all sorts of funky things: five eyes, spikes on the back, a mount on a stalk. Today, robotics is trying just one: a human droid…a humanoid.

We believe that’s boring.

This is why we are building the Cambrian Nights series, a gathering of builders, tinkerers and researchers working on robots that don’t look like us. Swarms, worms, blobs, animals, brains on odd substrates. If your robot (or model) has been called weird, you belong here.

Expect half-finished prototypes, strong opinions and good company.

Bring a robot, bring a sketch, or just bring your disdain for bipedal locomotion.

(Humanoid builders welcome too. We’ll be gentle. Mostly.)

PS: Pizza and snacks included.

PPS: Come to this, and we’ll shortlist you for Cambrian Night #2: against LLMs for robotics.

Who are we?

In a field obsessed with more data and even more compute, we are turning to nature. At Lumen, we are obsessed by how nature computes. How do fungi networks operate beneath the forest floor? How planaria is able to navigate tight unstructured environments with such little neural circuitry? How do Monarch butterflies travel for thousands of miles? Answering these questions allow us to build models/architectures that generalize to environments and embodiments that no amount of pre-training can solve.