Karl Pertsch

Karl Pertsch is a member of the technical staff at Physical Intelligence, where he works on training robot foundation models. He completed his postdoctoral research at UC Berkeley and Stanford University under the supervision of Sergey Levine and Chelsea Finn, and holds a PhD from the University of Southern California. He is best known for his work on generalist robot policies, including co-authoring OpenVLA, DROID, and embodied chain-of-thought reasoning for vision-language-action models.