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Builder summit/Physical AI

PAIR(ED)Physical AI, Robotics, Edge AI and Drones

Ready to PAIR?

One day, one floor, for tech teams building physical AI, robotics, edge AI and drones. Bring hardware, run it, take it apart with the people at the next bench. First edition. Free for teams. No press, no sales pitches.

Date
01DEC
City
Paris
Venue
CNIT Forest
Hours
9:00–17:30
Seats
90ONLY
Apply to attendHow it works ↓

Tech teams only · Free · No press

Brought together by FOST, FRnOG and DroneAid Collective.

0255075100
SERVO LOCKED · DETENT 01 / 07
01 / Format

A day on the bench.

Bring what you're building. The floor has benches, power, shared tools, and the people who wrote the firmware on the next table.

Bring
Your robot, your rig, your half-soldered prototype.
Hack
Open benches, shared tools, payload swaps all morning.
Talk
Propose a lightning talk when you apply. Five minutes, hardware welcome.
02 / Who

Tech teams only.

For teams building robots, drones, actuators, or the software that runs on them, who can put hardware on a bench and talk about what broke. Not for press or anyone with a sales pitch. Free for this first edition.

No press
No coverage on the floor.
Tech teams only
Every person in the room brought hardware or wrote for it.
No sales pitches
Talks by builders, about what broke.
03 / Themes

Four topics, one floor

TOP-01Active

Perception and sensing

Cameras, IMUs, contact and force sensing, proprioception, and how grounding degrades once the sensor is on a body that moves. Extrinsics shift after a fall, a head camera oscillates on a walking humanoid, SLAM drifts in dust, gripper calibration drifts.

TOP-02Active

Actuation and mechatronics

Motors, gearboxes, cycloidal and quasi-direct drives, compliance, thermal limits, and the airframe or chassis that survives a hard landing. The hardware layer a leg, a rotor and a micro-gripper share.

TOP-03Active

Control and autonomy

The policy stack: whole-body control, learned versus classical controllers, flight stacks, planning, and the sim-to-real gap measured on hardware. Sim2Real folds in here, and so does the fallback when the link drops.

TOP-04Active

Edge AI, deployment and security

Inference on the robot, power budgets, latency inside the control loop, and what fits on the SoC you already ship. Then the part after the bench: OTA updates, signed firmware, key storage on the device, and the attack surface a radio link opens.

Plate 07 · Manipulator, exploded
Exploded technical drawing of a robotic arm and hand

The day is built around this: something taken apart on a table, four people arguing about the third bearing from the left.

04 / The Day

Morning on the benches. Afternoon on stage.

Bring your own robot for the morning floor. After lunch, talks by teams with hardware deployed. No vendor pitches.

ProgrammeOpen floor / break

Morning: Bench & Arena

Bring your own robot
09:00
Dual-track live demos: Bench & Arena
Track 01 — The Benches: silicon, sensors, actuators, manipulators, and half-baked rigs. If it compiles and doesn't catch fire, show it.Track 02 — The Arena: high-torque humanoids and unleashed UAV flight testing in a reinforced safe zone. Prop wash guaranteed.
10:40–11:00
Coffee break
Hands off the soldering iron. Caffeine for the humans, cooling fans keep spinning.
12:00
DuckFightClub · Round 1
HuggingFace's Pollen Microducks fights in the arena. First heat of the day.
13:00
Refuel & Ingest
Caloric intake for humans. Logic boards stay powered, LFP chargers stay buzzing, bench debates continue.

Afternoon: Talks & Open Mic

Lightning talks, keynotes, open mic
14:00
Lightning talks: zero or one slide, zero fluff
Pure signal, zero noise. Five-minute pitches, architectural breakthroughs, and epic edge-case fails. One slide or get booted. Proposed at application.
15:00
Deep-dive keynotes (3 × 20 min)
Hardcore engineering from the bleeding edge. Production battle scars, control loops, state estimation, and modern robotics stacks.
16:00–16:30
Coffee break
Second refill. Stretch, recharge the packs, argue about state estimators.
16:30
Open mic
What worked, what didn't… how to improve this event?
16:50
Networking & last demos
Back to the benches and the Arena, same as the morning: rigs live, open discussions with speakers and attendees.
17:00
DuckFightClub · Round 2
Second heat in the cage. Round-one losers get a bracket to fight back through.
17:30
kill -9 // Hard shutdown
Cut main power, pack the Pelican cases, flush the buffers. Venue goes dark.
05 / Venue

CNIT Forest, Paris

One vaulted hall under the La Défense canopy, a stage at one end and benches on the main floor. High ceiling, hard floor, power at every demo table.

Address
2 Place de la Défense, 92800 Puteaux, France
Transit
La Défense · M1, RER A
Capacity
90 seats · Demo table or arena slot allocated on application
Access
Step-free throughout
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Contact
hello@pairedsummit.org
Map · 48.8918° N, 2.2389° E
GRID 12 · ZONE B
06 / Organisers

Brought together by PAIR(ED) collective.

FOST, FRnOG and DroneAid Collective have spent years putting technical communities in one room: software conferences, network operators, drone builders. PAIRED Summit puts those rooms on one floor.

FOST
80+ events

Vendor-neutral software conferences in 20 cities: apidays, GenerationAI, Green IO.

joinfost.io ↗
FRnOG
5,400+ members

A place for French network operators to talk to each other, since 2002. No marketing.

frnog.org ↗
DroneAid Collective
100+ workshops

Civilian resilience in Europe: FPV drone-building workshops in 14 cities and 11 countries this year.

droneaid.fr ↗
07 / Apply

Apply to attend

90 seats, to keep the floor workable. Demo tables or arena slot allocated on application. Applications close 27 November 2026. Tell us what you're bringing and whether you want a lightning-talk slot. We reply by email.

Apply to attend

Tech teams only · Free · No press