Physical AI Meetup - Perth

Where AI meets hardware and real-world systems, bringing together engineers, founders, academics, and other enthusiasts to learn, share, and connect.

PAI Group

Hear 3 expert talks, take the mic for a demo or announcement. Connect with ANZ's largest AI/hardware community over pizza & drinks.

Innovation Central Perth

Perth Community

Listen and learn, share a quick demo, prototype, or announcement – whether it's AI, hardware, or something you're building. All welcome.Pizza and drinks for this meetup are made possible by our sponsor, the <a href="https://www.icentralau.com.au/perth/" title="https://www.icentralau.com.au/perth/" target="_blank" data-msys-clicktrack="0" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">Innovation Central Perth</a> – an industry and science collaboration centre located at Curtin University, with the vision of advancing digital transformation through an open innovation ecosystem.<a href="https://www.meetup.com/physical-ai-perth/?utm_medium=referral" title="https://www.meetup.com/physical-ai-perth/?utm_medium=referral" target="_blank" data-msys-clicktrack="0" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">Join ANZ's largest community of practitioners building where AI meets hardware.</a>

Agenda

Please have your Eventbrite ticket ready at check-in – then enjoy pizza, drinks, and time to connect with other attendees.

Check-in, Pizza & Networking

Welcome & Intro

Democratisation of Edge AI
This talk brings Physical AI down from theory to the factory floor. It opens by framing Edge AI along two axes—edge versus cloud, and learned models versus traditional analytical rules—then walks through why industrial environments increasingly demand on-device intelligence.
Success stories anchor the talk on real Arduino hardware, covering everything from the first POC to product industrialization, with minimal re-engineering effort.
The talk closes by looking toward continuous learning at the edge as the next frontier for industrial AI.

Talk 1 by Massimo Sacchi

20ms vs 2 Seconds: What a Safety Vest Taught Us About Choosing the Right Visual AI
Not every vision problem needs a giant model — and not every giant model needs to see pixels the way you'd think. In this talk we'll unpack the real differences between CNNs, Vision-Language Models (VLMs), and multimodal LLMs: what they're each actually built to do, where their reasoning comes from, and why picking the wrong one costs you either accuracy or your latency budget. Then we'll put it to the test live, on a Jetson running our own safety-vest compliance demo (built with our ICP intern). We'll run the same camera feed through a YOLO object detector (20ms) and a PaliGemma VLM (2 seconds) side by side, and watch where each one shines — and where each one quietly gets it wrong. If you're building physical AI and wondering whether you need a 2-billion-parameter model or a 20-millisecond one, come find out.

Talk 2 by Stanley Chong

Gentle Embodied AI: Vision- and Tactile-Based Robotic Manipulation for a Delicate World
Modern robots excel at tasks demanding force, speed, and repeatability, yet they remain remarkably poor at gentleness – the careful, adaptive, contact-rich interaction required to handle fragile objects, manipulate deformable materials, or physically collaborate with people safely. This talk begins with vision-based manipulation and learning-based control – how robots can acquire visuo-motor skills, transfer them from simulation to the real world, and learn manipulation behaviours by watching human demonstrations. It then turns to gentleness and compliance: sensing and reasoning about contact and force so a robot can modulate its grip and motion. A central theme is bringing vision, learning, and contact information together so robots can adapt to delicate, deformable, and unpredictable objects. The talk shares representative results, lessons learned, and promising directions.

Talk 3 by Dr Fangyi Zhang

Short informal shares – demo, prototype, or quick announcement (hiring, collaboration, project updates). 1-2 minutes each.

Community Open Mic

Any further Q&As and chats will happen here.

Physical AI Meetup - Perth

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Physical AI Meetup - Perth

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