A team of INSAIT, part of Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski,” achieved a historic success by being one of only two teams to qualify for RoboArena – an international challenge for evaluating the latest AI models in robotics. The event was organized by researchers from Stanford University, the University of California, Berkeley, and other leading institutions, and took place as part of CoRL 2025 in Seoul.

INSAIT’s model delivered outstanding results, outperforming even the most powerful existing solutions trained on ten times more data, including the pi0 model by Physical Intelligence - a Stanford University startup that raised 0 million in initial funding from Jeff Bezos and OpenAI. The institute plans to officially release its model soon.

In parallel, INSAIT presented the research MotoVLA – a novel approach that allows robots to learn not only from pre-prepared datasets but also through observation of the real environment and video, paving the way for more flexible and generalizable robotic systems.

The success is credited to researchers Alexander Spiridonov, Nikolay Nikolov, and Giuliano Albanese, who represented Bulgaria at this prestigious international forum.

These results demonstrate that through INSAIT, Bulgaria is establishing itself as a significant contributor to the global development of AI for robotics.

Source: press release