Robot Hackathon: Harnessing Physical AI & Data

Build physical AI applications with real robot arms.About the Event Viam and MongoDB are excited to host a two-day, hands-on hackathon for curious, ambitious builders who want to go deep on physical AI. You'll get a real robot arm and support from Viam experts throughout. No prior robotics experience is required, just an interest in physical AI and some software experience. Space is limited! Apply through this page. Applicants will be accepted on a rolling basis.What You'll Build Working in a team of 2-3, you'll build an end-to-end robotics application using Viam and a real robot arm.Each team will have access to: UFactory xArm or Universal Robots arm with a two-finger gripper attachment (feel free to also bring your own SO-101)Linux compute machineRealSense D435 or Orbbec Astra 2 camera (fixed to arm)WebcamsA free Viam accountA MongoDB Atlas cluster for storing and querying your robot's data: sensor readings, grasp attempts, run logs and embeddings We’ll provide a variety of objects for your robot to manipulate. You are encouraged to bring anything required for the project you have in mind. Please bring your own laptop. In your application, please summarize what project you have in mind. Ideas from past events: training a VLA, playing chess, mixing a cocktail, quality inspection, drawing a picture, puzzle insertion, manipulating a robot arm using computer vision and hand gestures. Build with MongoDB Atlas Robots produce a lot of data, and the best teams use it. Every team gets MongoDB Atlas to give their robot a memory. Some ideas: Log every attempt (poses, gripper force, camera metadata, success or failure) and query it to tune your approach between runsUse Atlas Vector Search to match what the camera sees against known objects, which helps with the recycling sort or open-track ideasStore task plans, scene descriptions or past outcomes so an LLM-driven robot can retrieve context before it actsBuild a live dashboard of your benchmark runs Using Atlas isn't required, but strong, creative uses of it will stand out to the judges. Prizes We'll award prizes to a total of three teams. Each member of a winning team will take home SO-101 pre-assembled robot kits, including: a leader arm, a follower arm, and a camera + Viam credits. Gold: SO-101 arm + $5,000 in MongoDB Atlas credits and $5,000 in Viam creditsSilver: SO-101 arm + $2,500 in MongoDB Atlas credits and $2,500 in Viam creditsBronze: SO-101 arm + $1,000 in MongoDB Atlas credits and $1,000 in Viam credits Please bring your own laptop. We recommend taking our free online course Viam 101 (est time: 45-90mins) ahead of time. Even if you only go through the first lessons, it will help you get the hang of things quickly. Schedule Thursday, October 29 9:00 AM: Check-in and breakfast 9:30 AM: Kickoff: Welcome & crash course on building with Viam and MongoDB 10:00 AM: Teams and hardware 10:30 AM: Hacking begins 1:00 PM: Lunch 6:00 PM: Dinner 9:00 PM: Hard close: Robots power down, doors close (no overnight hacking) Friday, October 30 9:00 AM: Doors open, breakfast 9:30 AM: Hacking resumes 12:30 PM: Lunch 3:30 PM: Demos and drinks 5:00 PM: Awards 6:00 PM: Event concludes What Skills You Need No robotics experience required, but you should be comfortable with: Coding: Python, Go, TypeScript/JavaScript, or C++Linux: Using SSH and running basic terminal commandsJSON: Reading and editing configuration filesGit: Basic workflows so your team can build togetherBonus: knowing how to plug in a pre-trained vision model (like YOLO or OpenCV) to help the robot see and identify objects (not required)Bonus: Some familiarity with MongoDB or document databases (not required, and mentors can help you get started) Before the Event We recommend taking our free online course Viam 101 (est time: 45-90mins) ahead of time. Even the first few lessons will help you get the hang of things quickly. How to Join Space is limited! Apply through this page. Applicants will be accepted on a rolling basis. We’ll select a curated group of ambitious software developers and send official confirmations to accepted participants. Attendees must be approved in advance to participate. Presented By Viam: The robotics software platform we’ll use to configure, control, and deploy models to your robot. Viam makes it easy to get a robot up and running quickly. MongoDB: The developer data platform for storing, searching and analyzing your robot's data, including vector search for AI-powered retrieval.