Pieter Abbeel

Abbeel attended Sint Michielscollege in Brasschaat, Belgium, and loved basketball. He studied engineering at KU Leuven for five years, choosing electronics after the first two, and finished in 2000; on the advice of professors including Bart de Moor he went on to Stanford UniversityStanford UniversityStanford University is a research university in California founded by Leland and Jane Stanford in 1885 and opened in 1891.Open the full entry, where he did his PhD under Andrew NgAndrew NgAndrew Ng is a British-born computer scientist and AI educator. A former director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab, he helped found Google Brain and Coursera, served as Baidu’s chief scientist from 2014 to 2017, and later founded DeepLearning.AI, LandingAI and AI Fund.Open the full entry.⁠[1]

He received an MS in electrical engineering from KU Leuven in 2000 and a PhD in computer science from Stanford University in 2008.⁠[2]

From 2008 Abbeel was a professor at UC Berkeley and director of its Robot Learning Lab, later also co-directing the Berkeley AI Research Lab. His research has robots learn from people (apprenticeship learning), from their own trial and error (reinforcement learning), and faster through meta-learning; his robots have learned helicopter aerobatics, knot-tying, basic assembly, organizing laundry and locomotion.⁠[3]

In September 2008 the Stanford autonomous helicopter project Abbeel worked on during his PhD presented an apprenticeship learning approach: a human expert flies the same trick about 10 times on a remote-controlled helicopter, and software computes an ideal flight path that lets the autonomous helicopter learn a complex maneuver in under 30 minutes. Abbeel explained that simply replaying a human pilot’s sequence of controls is not sufficient.⁠[4]

In April 2010 a Berkeley team led by then assistant professor Abbeel and doctoral student Jeremy Maitin-Shepard for the first time enabled an autonomous robot to reliably fold piles of previously unseen towels. The robot, built by Willow Garage and running the team’s algorithm, used high-resolution cameras to find two adjacent corners before folding, tackling the problem of perceiving and manipulating deformable objects.⁠[5]

On August 23, 2011, Abbeel, 33, was named to Technology Review’s TR35 list of the world’s top innovators under 35. He was recognized for the concept of apprenticeship learning he developed as a PhD student and for work enabling robots to tie surgical knots and fold towels and socks; he said personal robots that do chores would let elderly and disabled people live more independent lives.⁠[6]

In 2014 Abbeel co-founded Gradescope with Arjun Singh, Sergey Karayev and Ibrahim Awwal, Singh and Awwal being his former students; the company was acquired by Turnitin in 2018.⁠[7]

In November 2017 Abbeel, who had worked on AI first as a Berkeley professor and then as a researcher at OpenAIOpenAIOpenAI is an artificial intelligence research and product organization founded in 2015 that develops the GPT model series, ChatGPT, Codex and a developer API, and conducts research on image, speech, video and intelligent agents. After its 2025 restructuring, the nonprofit OpenAI Foundation continues to control the for-profit OpenAI Group PBC. Its growth has involved large-scale fundraising and compute partnerships, and has also been accompanied by controversies over governance, copyright, privacy and AI safety.Open the full entry, started Embodied Intelligence in Emeryville, California, with former OpenAI researchers Peter Chen and Rocky Duan and former MicrosoftMicrosoftMicrosoft is a technology company founded by Bill Gates and Paul Allen in 1975 and headquartered in Redmond, Washington, with businesses spanning Windows, Microsoft 365, Azure, enterprise software, artificial intelligence, gaming and devices.Open the full entry researcher Tianhao Zhang, to build algorithms that let machines learn tasks on their own. “We now have teachable robots,” Abbeel said.⁠[8]

The company raised a $7 million seed round led by Amplify Partners, with Lux CapitalLux CapitalLux Capital is a U.S. venture capital firm founded in 2000 by Peter Hébert, Josh Wolfe and Robert Paull, with offices in New York and Silicon Valley. Focused on emerging science and technology, the firm backs companies in fields including life sciences, artificial intelligence, robotics, manufacturing, aerospace and defense through fund investments and by helping to found companies.Open the full entry, SV Angels and others participating, and planned to let users demonstrate tasks through a virtual reality headset so its software could teach existing robots.⁠[9]

Turnitin acquired Gradescope, a grading platform originally developed by computer science teaching assistants at UC Berkeley and already used at half of all Ivy LeagueIvy LeagueThe Ivy League is an intercollegiate athletic conference comprising eight universities in the northeastern United States: Brown University, Columbia University, Cornell University, Dartmouth College, Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania, Princeton University, and Yale University. It was formally established in 1954, with league competition beginning in the 1956–57 academic year. Its athletic framework emphasizes student status, academic standards, and financial aid based on need. The name is also commonly used collectively for the eight member institutions.Open the full entry schools; Turnitin CEO Chris Caren called it the company’s first formal foray into STEM education.⁠[10]

On December 16, 2018, Abbeel appeared on the Lex FridmanLex FridmanLex Fridman is a Soviet-born, US-raised computer scientist and podcast host who works as an MIT research scientist on human-AI interaction and autonomous driving. His Lex Fridman Podcast is known for hours-long conversations with guests including heads of state and technology leaders.Open the full entry Podcast in an episode on deep reinforcement learning; the episode summary described him as a UC Berkeley professor and director of the Berkeley Robot Learning Lab who studies how to make robots understand and interact with the world through imitation and deep reinforcement learning.⁠[11]

In January 2020 Covariant, where Abbeel was co-founder and chief scientist, came out of stealth and announced its work with warehouse logistics provider Knapp: its algorithms were deployed in two Knapp customers’ warehouses, one of them, run by German electrical supplier Obeta, fully in production since the previous September. Its Covariant Brain platform trains robotic arms to pick items through imitation and reinforcement learning; Abbeel and CEO Peter Chen estimated a robot must be at least 99% accurate to pay back the investment.⁠[12]

In March 2021 Abbeel launched The Robot Brains, a podcast hosting leading experts in AI robotics; the first episode featured Andrej KarpathyAndrej KarpathyAndrej Karpathy is an AI researcher and educator, one of the founding members of OpenAI, who served as Tesla’s Director of AI and led the Autopilot computer vision team from 2017 to 2022, founded the AI education company Eureka Labs in 2024, and joined Anthropic in 2026 to work on pre-training research; at Stanford he designed and taught the university’s first deep learning course, CS231n, and he coined the term “vibe coding.”Open the full entry, then director of AI at Tesla, and the second PrincetonPrinceton UniversityPrinceton University is a private university and Ivy League member in Princeton, New Jersey. Chartered on October 22, 1746 as the College of New Jersey, it moved to Princeton in 1756 and adopted its present name in 1896. Undergraduate education leads to A.B. and B.S.E. degrees and emphasizes small-group discussion, independent research and residential college life. Graduate education spans the humanities, social sciences, natural sciences and engineering. As of October 2026, Christopher L. Eisgruber was president. Its 2026–27 operating budget was $3.407 billion, including $342 million for undergraduate aid.Open the full entry professor and AI4All co-founder Olga Russakovsky.⁠[13]

On October 27, 2021, the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society announced that Abbeel would receive the 2022 IEEE Kiyo Tomiyasu Award “for contributions to deep learning for robotics,” to be presented at ICRA in Philadelphia in May 2022.⁠[14]

In April 2022 Abbeel received the 2021 ACMAustralian Community MediaAustralian Community Media (ACM) is an Australian regional and rural news publishing group with more than 100 brands, including The Canberra Times; in 2019 Nine sold it to a company controlled by interests associated with Antony Catalano and Thorney Investment Group.Open the full entry Prize in Computing, which carries $250,000 from an endowment provided by InfosysInfosysInfosys (Infosys Limited) is an information technology services and consulting company headquartered in Bengaluru, India, founded in 1981 by N. R. Narayana Murthy and six others. Listed on Indian stock exchanges and the New York Stock Exchange, it had revenues of $20.158 billion in fiscal 2026 and more than 328,000 employees, and is one of India’s major information technology services companies.Open the full entry. He was cited for teaching robots through human demonstration and their own trial and error, for introducing few-shot imitation learning, and for combining reinforcement learning with deep neural networks to usher in deep reinforcement learning; he was then also co-founder, president and chief scientist of Covariant.⁠[15]

In April 2023 Covariant raised $75 million in Series C funding co-led by Radical VenturesRadical VenturesRadical Ventures is an artificial intelligence-focused venture capital firm founded by Jordan Jacobs and Tomi Poutanen shortly after the 2017 launch of the Vector Institute in Toronto. It invests from incubation and seed through growth and pre-IPO stages, and its portfolio includes companies such as Cohere, Waabi, and World Labs. In 2026, it co-led the investment in Discovery Loop, founded by Jeff Dean and others, and completed the first close of its late-stage Radical Breakouts Fund.Open the full entry and Index Ventures; it had announced the first $80 million of the round in 2021 and had raised $222 million since its founding. CEO Peter Chen said the company grew sixfold in 2022.⁠[16]

In March 2024 Covariant launched RFM-1 (Robotics Foundation Model 1), trained on a large trove of data gathered from deployments of its Covariant Brain platform in warehouses; CEO Peter Chen said it “is basically a large language model (LLM), but for robot language.”⁠[17]

On August 30, 2024, Amazon announced it was hiring Covariant co-founders Abbeel, Peter Chen and Rocky Duan, along with research scientists and engineers making up about a quarter of Covariant’s staff, into its Fulfillment Technologies & Robotics team, and taking a non-exclusive license to Covariant’s robotic foundation models; terms were not disclosed. Co-founder Tianhao Zhang stayed and, with Ted Stinson as CEO, took over leadership of Covariant.⁠[18]

On December 17, 2025, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy announced that AGI head Rohit PrasadRohit PrasadRohit Prasad is an artificial intelligence executive who led work on Alexa and artificial general intelligence at Amazon and oversaw development of the Amazon Nova foundation model family; he has been chief executive officer of the robotics company Boston Dynamics since October 2026.Open the full entry would leave and that Peter DeSantis would lead a new models and chips organization, and that Abbeel, an Amazon Distinguished Scientist in robotics, would lead the company’s frontier model research team; Jassy called him “one of the world’s leading AI researchers.”⁠[19]

As of October 2026 Abbeel describes himself as a professor in artificial intelligence and robotics at UC Berkeley and an Amazon Scholar, with research interests in generative AI, reinforcement learning and humanoid robotics. His students have co-founded over a dozen AI companies, including OpenAI, Perplexity and Physical IntelligencePhysical IntelligencePhysical Intelligence (π or Pi for short) is a San Francisco–based robotics AI company that develops general-purpose foundation models for many kinds of robots; its best-known work includes the π0 family of models.Open the full entry; he was also elected to the Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium for Science and the Arts in 2022.⁠[20]

Personal website: Public link: https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~pabbeel/ (opens in a new window)⁠[2]

UC Berkeley: Official website: https://www.berkeley.edu/ (opens in a new window)⁠[6]

Covariant: Official website: https://covariant.ai/ (opens in a new window)⁠[7]

Gradescope: Official website: https://www.gradescope.com/ (opens in a new window)⁠[7]

Amazon: Official website: https://www.aboutamazon.com/ (opens in a new window)⁠[18]