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KIT Intuitive Robots Lab

Research labKarlsruhe, Germany

Rudolf Lioutikov's Intuitive Robots Lab at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology; released the FLOWER VLA.

Overview

The Intuitive Robots Lab (IRL) is part of the Institute for Anthropomatics and Robotics at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology and develops machine learning methods for human-robot interaction and robot learning. In September 2025 it released FLOWER, a 950M-parameter flow-matching VLA pre-trained in about 200 H100 GPU hours, with pre-training and fine-tuning code and CALVIN and LIBERO checkpoints published.

Sources: irl.iar.kit.edu (19 Oct 2026) · arxiv.org (5 Sep 2025) · intuitive-robots.github.io (19 Oct 2026)

Type
Research lab
Headquarters
Karlsruhe, Germanyarxiv.org, 5 Sep 2025

Key people

  • Moritz ReussLead author, FLOWERarxiv.org, 5 Sep 2025
  • Hongyi ZhouCo-author, FLOWERarxiv.org, 5 Sep 2025
  • Rudolf LioutikovSenior author, FLOWER; lab headarxiv.org, 5 Sep 2025

Funding history

Research lab · University research lab at KIT; no separate funding.

Ranking

#18 of 104 model companies · score 72.4 / 100 · updated 19 Oct 2026

  • Published benchmarks 35%97%
  • Open weights 20%100%
  • Adoption 20%42%
  • Released models 15%20%
  • Disclosed funding 10%n/a

Each bar shows an input from 0 to 100% before weighting. 1 of 1 listed models have open weights. Most-starred official repository: intuitive-robots/flower_vla_calvin (100 stars, 19 Oct 2026).

How we rank model companies

The score (0–100) measures public, checkable evidence about a company's robot models. It does not measure private capability. A company that publishes no benchmark results and no weights can still have strong models. Every input is computed from the data on each company page, and every number there links to its source.

InputWeightHow it is measured
Published benchmarks35%For each scored benchmark, the company's best result divided by the best result any company has published, averaged over the benchmarks it reports. No published results scores 0. Results come only from the model's own paper, model card or the official benchmark leaderboard. Scored: LIBERO (4-suite average success, %); SimplerEnv Google Robot, visual matching (%); SimplerEnv Google Robot, variant aggregation (%); SimplerEnv WidowX / Bridge (%); CALVIN ABC→D (average length, 0–5); RoboArena (pairwise rating).
Open weights20%Share of the company's listed models whose weights the public can download.
Adoption20%GitHub stars on the company's most-starred official model repository, on a log scale relative to the most-starred repository in the list. Hugging Face downloads are shown on company pages but not scored, because gated repositories report zero.
Released models15%Number of publicly announced, named models, capped at 5.
Disclosed funding10%The sum of the funding rounds listed on the company's profile that were disclosed in USD, on a log scale from $10M to the largest sum in the list. Rounds reported only in other currencies are listed but not converted or counted. This input applies only to private startups and robot makers. For big-tech divisions, research labs and listed companies it is n/a, and its weight is shared across the other inputs in proportion.

Sources. arXiv papers and official model cards for benchmarks and parameters; official leaderboards (RoboArena); the GitHub and Hugging Face APIs for stars and downloads; company announcements and established press for funding. Missing values are shown as n/a, never estimated.

Updated 19 Oct 2026. Benchmark protocols differ between papers, for example in fine-tuning and number of trials, so small gaps between close scores are not meaningful.

Submit or correct data →

Open-weights models (1)

KIT Intuitive Robots Lab logo

FLOWER

Open weightsVLA

Flow-matching VLA that prunes LLM layers (intermediate-modality fusion) and uses Global-AdaLN conditioning to keep the model under 1B parameters.

Released
5 Sep 2025
Parameters
950M
License
MIT
Embodiments
single-arm, bimanual
GitHub stars
100 as of 19 Oct 2026
HF downloads (all time)
279 as of 19 Oct 2026
Published benchmark results for FLOWER
BenchmarkResultSource
CALVIN ABC→DCALVIN ABC->D average successful length (0-5)4.53arxiv.orgAbstract: 4.53 on CALVIN ABC. As of 5 Sep 2025
LIBEROAverage success rate across LIBERO-Spatial/Object/Goal/Long (%)96.9%arxiv.orgTable 13, Average (without LIBERO-90) column. As of 5 Sep 2025