"A Tale of Two Cultures: Can Agentic Coding Close the Gap?" plenary by Ken Goldberg at ICRA 2026

This 50-min presentation to 8000 researchers at the annual conference on robotics and automation in Vienna on 2 June 2026 considers several subcultures and divisions within the global research community, including Automation vs Robotics, Model-Based vs Model-Free, and Specialist vs Generalist. Goldberg argues that these gaps could be narrowed by recent advances in agentic coding, where agents quickly configure robots and sensors for high-throughput tasks that combine model-based with model-free methods. The first part of the talk reviews background and the case study of Ambi Robotics. The second part of the talk introduces "Variational Automation" (VA) tasks such as sorting packages and making espressos, a class of revenue-earning applications between fixed automation and generalist robotics. The talk then describes a new approach designed for VA tasks: “Graph-as-Policy” (GaP) combines LLM-based code generation with VLM perception using a graphical structure to integrate engineered skills and learned policies into modular, interpretable computation graphs like ROS. GaP has potential to close the "reliability gap" that is particularly important VA tasks. Goldberg presents recent results and outlines how Agentic Robotics could enable reliable automation systems that perform useful work while generating the data needed to close all three gaps. To find out more follow on X: @Ken_Goldberg or visit http://goldberg.berkeley.edu.