MakerMods Physical AI Hackathon

MakerMods Physical AI Hacks 🤖

This is the best Physical AI hackathon you've been looking for.

Join MakerMods and Dream Labs on November 7–8 at Founders Inc. in San Francisco for a weekend of building physical AI: robots that act on the world, agents that coordinate those actions, and applications that bring the two together.

We’re bringing bimanual 6-axis robot arms, Dream Labs’ Dream-1, and a target of 200 builders into one space. Bring your ideas, your teammates, and a willingness to debug something that can actually move.

Brough to you by

MakerMods

MakerMods is a full-stack robotics company making Physical AI accessible to everyone. We build affordable robot hardware and software that lets people teach robots to do physical tasks—from makers experimenting at home to researchers building the next generation of robot intelligence. Built for makers, by makers.

Dream Labs

Dream Labs is bringing “everyday capabilities to everyday robots.” Its robot brain, Dream-1, is built to work across different robots, tasks, and environments. Through the Dream API, developers can turn camera observations and task instructions into robot actions, and adapt the model with their own demonstrations.

The Challege:

Two ways to build

🏁 Hill Climb

One challenge. One leaderboard.

Take on a shared, long horizon Physical AI tasks using our Metal Arm stations.

Your team's rank is based only on your eval score.

No pitching. No larping. It's all skill based.

You’ll collect demonstrations and fine-tune the lastest SOTA World Action Model by Dream Labs: Dream-1. Then your team builds the harness around the model: deciding what happens next, checking whether an action worked, and recovering when it didn’t.

The same Dream-1 model can produce very different results depending on the fine-tuning data and the harness you build around it.

Can your robot finish the task? Can it recover from a failed attempt? Can you push your score higher before the deadline?

Scores come from task performance against published rules. Leading teams will make scored attempts live on stage while the competition continues at the other stations.

The full challenge and scoring rules will be shared before the event.

💡 Creative Applications (Track 2) What would you build if your agent had robot arms?

Build an application around Dream-1 and our Maker Arm stations.

Connect robot actions to voice, agents, human input, and everyday tools. Make something useful, surprising, playful—or something nobody in the room would have thought to try.

Some directions to explore

• A voice-controlled assistant that asks for help when it gets stuck.
• A robot workflow triggered by a calendar event or a message.
• An interactive experience where people and robots solve something together.
• A physical tool your software agent can call to get a real-world job done.

Book robot time, bring your own props or work creatively with the materials available, and film your project in action.

Three finalists will pitch on stage with their demo videos. A judging panel will select first, second, and third place.

Creative awards are judged separately from the hill-climb leaderboard, with the rubric published beforehand.

Who should join?

Robot-learning researchers. ML engineers. Agent builders. Hardware hackers. Students. Designers with an idea that needs to exist outside a screen.

You don’t need to arrive as a robotics expert. Teams will need different strengths: collecting demonstrations, building agents, integrating tools, designing interactions, and making the whole stack work. Workshops from MakerMods, Dream Labs and more sponsors will help you get familiar with frontier Physical AI robotics hardware and world action models.

If you’ve been looking for a reason to try physical AI on real hardware, this is it.

What to expect

• Shared access to real bimanual robot stations.
• Dream-1 access for building and running your projects.
• An opening setup workshop to help teams get started.
• A weekend of building alongside people working across robotics and AI.
• Live robot attempts, creative project pitches, and awards across both tracks.

Robot time will be booked and shared across teams. Plan to use time away from the arms for coding, reviewing data, and improving your application.

The details

📍 Founders Inc., San Francisco 📅 November 7–8, 2026 👥 Teams of 3–6; around five is ideal 🤝 Apply with a team or apply solo and meet other builders

Bring your laptop and charger. For creative projects, you’re welcome to bring props; we’ll share setup and hardware guidance before the event.

The detailed schedule, station-booking process, challenge rules, prize announcements, and confirmed partners will follow.

Ready to build?

Apply to join MakerMods Physical AI Hacks.

Bring an idea. Leave with a robot doing something you built.