When it comes to writing a weekly newsletter like Automated, any semblance of a weekly “theme” is largely coincidental. At the most abstract level, all of the pieces have robotics/AI/automation at their heart, but beyond that, any overlap is a product of macro trends, happenstance, or some hasty last-minute bid to write a cohesive intro. One thing we strive to deliver each week with the features section up top, however, is a snapshot of the industry at this current moment.
This week’s is a prime example of that last bit. Kicking things off is an interview with Apptronik CEO, Jeff Cardenas. A bit of color on that one: he was a couple of minutes late for our call because the company recently expanded its space and he literally has more ground to cover between meetings. Also related: they just completed a $935 million Series A round that values the humanoid manufacturer at around $5 billion.
Next up is Gary Cohen, a veteran of the disposable razor wars who stepped into the role of iRobot CEO after Amazon’s acquisition bid was snuffed out by E.U. regulation. The Roomba maker recently emerged from Chapter 11 after being acquired by its Shenzhen-based OEM partner.
We also spoke with Kaan Dogrusoz, the cofounder and CEO of Weave Robotics, which recently began delivering its clothes-folding humanoid robot to select Bay Area-based cusstomers.
Yesterday we published the first-ever live version of the Automated podcast, featuring our chat with industry vet, Mikell Taylor, from last month’s A3 Business Forum in Orlando. Taylor, who currently heads up robotics strategy for GM’s new Autonomous Robotics Center (ARC), discusses her long stint at Amazon Robotics, being an early employee at the company that would become Rethink Robotics, and building her own startup.
Here’s a quick bit from that chat, in which she explains why the humanoid form factor might not be the end-all be-all of generalized robotics many are currently making it out to be.
I think that coordinated multi-armed manipulation is going to be a critical unlock from a technology perspective for a whole bunch of industries, including automotive manufacturing. I think that the AI that is being used to accelerate that work right now is also going to be a critical unlock. Do I think it needs to be on a human-sized and shaped torso with a head? Not necessarily. Do I think it needs to be two arms instead of three arms or a king crab with one giant one and one little one? No, I don't think so. Its cool though. I really want to see a company do like a prehensile tail for manipulation. Come on, let's get creative. Why are we humans being so narcissistic thinking we are the ideal?
I think that there's a lot more creativity out there that we're going to discover as we get the fundamental unlocks that we need, which, like I said, is this coordination, this intelligence, this dexterity. Then we can look at what is the form factor that makes sense. In an industrial environment built for forklifts and carts, I'm not convinced that you need bipedal locomotion. Maybe you need wheels, maybe you need quadrupedal, maybe there are places you need bipedal, for various reasons. I think in a home environment, you need bipedal, maybe quadrupedal, but not wheels. I think we'll get smarter over time about finding the right embodiments of this stuff, but I think the core technology unlock is really around that manipulation and intelligence, and I want to see that happen.
I think this is a great way to start re-contextualizing the humanoid form factor for 2026 — not as the goal for generalization in robotics, but rather the beginning.
The latest version of Apollo has been kicking around Apptronik’s facilities for roughly a year now. The humanoid has been deployed for commercial pilots, and as part of a high-profile research partnership with Google’s Gemini Robotics. In fact, the Austin-based robotics startup has already produced more units of the new system than it had its predecessor, which was unveiled back in 2023. So why haven’t we actually seen it yet?
“We've always prided ourselves on substance,” cofounder and CEO, Jeff Cardenas, explains on a call following the company’s recent funding news. “One of the bars that I have is if I can show you something in a video, I should be able to show you the same thing in person live.”
It’s reasonable, as release standards go. As industrial robotics — humanoids in particular — have captured the public imagination, however, not everyone is adhering to the same rulebook. Many “demos” have become increasingly indistinguishable from slick car ads, as the wrong lessons have been gleaned from viral robot videos of years past. If humanoids are going to work in any meaningful way, however, they’re going to have to do much better than executing a task successfully for a camera one time out of 20.
They’re going to have to do something useful correctly, repeatedly, at scale, and with minimal downtime. Cardenas notes that the latest Apollo has been shown off extensively to investors — forming the founding of an extension round that increased Apptronik’s Series A to just shy of $1 billion, valuing the company at $5+ billion in the process. The model has continually participated in testing and data collection, all while the company has been holding off for “something really interesting to show” when it makes its public debut.
As far as where the bar for “really interesting” sits these days in the world of highly advanced humanoid robots, Cardenas says, “new behaviors, new sort of work, just showing the integration of the hardware and the software.” He adds that the debut will “show what the models are capable of and how we're integrating those models on the robot. There's been a lot of work to get the data collection engine built up and harden the hardware.”
“I've got a whole back room of lawnmowers that haven't seen the light of day,” Gary Cohen notes. It’s more than just an allusion to unfulfilled promises. It’s true-life example — albeit one that’s largely been relegated to the pre-pandemic memory hole. There was genuine excitement around iRobot’s next big product category when Terra was unveiled in a Las Vegas conference room during CES 2019.
None of the company’s bids to move beyond the robot vacuum — the gutter-clearing Looj, floor-mopping Scooba, and pool-scrubbing Mirra — had sufficiently stuck the landing. Terra felt different — for one thing, the Roomba-maker had worked on the project for more than a decade. But long last, iRobot was ready to show the results to the world. And then, for the next year or so, things went quiet.
In April 2020, as the first wave of Covid was cresting in the continental U.S., iRobot confirmed what many suspected — Terra was delayed indefinitely. Truly unfortunate timing played a key role in the decision not to launch that year, as iRobot cited “current market realities,” adding that it would “reassess options for launching it when the time is right.” In hindsight, of course, things went from bad to worse for consumer electronics companies highly dependent on the global supply chain.
That Cohen inherited a backroom of lawnmowers wasn’t the product of any single misstep. iRobot’s recent fortunes are the outcome of a drawn confluence of circumstances and decisions that recently found the company journeying through the Chapter 11 process and emerging on the other end a subsidiary of its Shenzhen-based manufacturer, Picea Robotics. Nor are the lawnmowers the sole R&D casualty of these past several years.
“We've got a lot of products that had been invented and close to commercialization that are sitting around that we still are testing.” Says Cohen. “But a lot of those products needed a better cost curve, or we'll probably make some enhancements and modifications that take advantage of the latest navigation and the latest cost curve to be able to bring those to market. But we have good IP on a lot of those categories as well. I've got to give [Angle] and the team a lot of props for their inventiveness and their ability to come up with a number of ideas. And I think one of my goals will be, I'd be nothing prouder than to take some of these ideas and see them come to light and see them hit the marketplace.”
Shipping a single product is a milestone plenty of robotics startups will never reach. Not that there’s any time to stop and celebrate, of course. Once your systems are out in the world, you’re suddenly beholden to an entirely new group of people, faced with new challenges and edge cases you’d never dreamt up in the comforting confines of a laboratory setting.
When I Iast spoke with Kaan Dogrusoz over the summer, Weave Robotics’ CEO told me the company was shooting to deliver its home robot, Isaac, before the end of 2025. It was a bit of an overly optimistic goal, but just 1.5 months into this year, the startup has made good on delivering a version of its system.
As the name suggests, Isaac 0 isn’t the fully realized mobile robotic platform cruising around the living room in the looping video on Weave’s home page. The company describes it as “the simplest possible form for a laundry folding robot” — a fitting description for a product that began life as a prototype for the more complex version of the platform.
“It was that ruthless paring down that allowed us to deploy our fleet to our first commercial customers' locations as a young team,” the Weave team writes in a recent blog post. “Our fleet has now been operating for months, folding thousands of pounds of laundry every month. And we're now bringing that experience to a new environment, the home. Homes are less forgiving than labs and less predictable than commercial laundries. They demand robots that work without supervision and are quiet, reliable, and safe. The very focus that made Isaac 0 stationary is exactly what makes it ready to be useful in homes.”
So that’s the product Weave began shipping to Bay Area-based customers willing to pay $8,000 up front or $450 a month for an at-home laundry folding robot. Dogrusoz tells me the decision was motivated by the simple desire to get more robots out into the real world.
There was no external or internal pressure to get something out,” he says. “It really is something that is part of our DNA. I would say we really believe that robots should be out of the labs at this point in like a safe and responsible way.”
Following a year-long pilot with three Digit robots, Toyota Motor Manufacturing Canada announced Thursday plans to deploy seven of Agility’s humanoids at assembly plants. The robots will be stationed at three Ontario locations, loading and unloading totes from automated forklifts. “Toyota Motor Manufacturing Canada has long been a leader in automotive manufacturing innovation,” TMMC president Tim Hollander notes in a statement tied to the news. “After evaluating a number of robots, we are excited to deploy Digit to improve the team member experience and further increase operational efficiency in our manufacturing facilities.” Further Digits will be deployed if this phase goes well.
In hindsight, I may have jumped the gun a few weeks back, writing about Dexory’s 40-foot-high scanning AMR. Turns out if I had held out just a bit longer, I could have skipped straight to the 60-foot versions. I suppose that’s one of the risks you take covering a field like this — there’s always another robot waiting just around the corner that’s going to run faster, jump further, or scan higher. Good news on that front, though, the warehouse inventory robot is modular, so users can tack on new hardware features like temperature monitoring without having to toss the whole thing out and start over again. The latest version of Dexory’s hardware made its public debut at last week’s Manifest conference in Las Vegas.
As the tech world goes, Milton Keynes is best-known as the home of Bletchley Park, where Alan Turning and co. cracked the German Enigma machine during WWII. These days, the city, located roughly 50 miles outside of London, has been working to maintain its tech bona fides as a real-world testing bed for technologies. It’s been a key spot for Estonia’s Starship Technologies and recently added RIVR’s delivery dogs to the list. The Zurich firm is best known for its quadrupedal systems, which pair legged and wheeled mobility. The partnership finds RIVR’s robots carrying out last-mile delivery for food ordering app, Just Eat Takeaway.com.
Per RIVR CEO Marko Bjelonic, "Expanding our partnership with Just Eat Takeaway.com is an important step in scaling autonomous delivery across European cities. By automating delivery at the customer’s doorstep, our technology removes friction at the point of handover and creates a more seamless experience for consumers. The launch in Milton Keynes reflects a shared focus on practical, automated delivery that integrates seamlessly into existing operations and scales with demand."
If you’re like me 1. I’m sorry. 2. You spend more time than you should thinking about the Ship of Thesus. The paradoxical thought experiment posits whether a ship that has pieces replaced, one by one, can still be considered the same object once none of its original parts remain. With that in mind, I fully endorse the University of Michigan christening this modular quadruped “The Robot of Theseus.” The fact that “T.R.O.T.” is an absolutely killer acronym for a four-legged system doesn’t hurt, either.
The robot was designed to be a (relatively) low-cost method for carrying out biomechanical experiments, with a 3D bill of goods that rounds out to about $4,000. “I wanted to make a robot that could easily shapeshift into several different extinct species proportions, so that we could compare them, and see how the evolution of those limb lengths and other features would affect their locomotion,” says researcher Talia Moore. “With T.R.O.T., 60 million years of evolutionary changes in body size can happen in 20 minutes.”
Mikell Taylor (GM) - It's our first-ever live episode of Automated, now available for your pre-recorded viewing pleasure.
Brian Gerkey (Intrinsic)- We take a whirlwind trip from the early days of Willow Garage, to ROS's acceleration under Open Robotics, and his current days at Alphabet's Intrinsic.
Kence Anderson (Amesa) - AI ethics, unconscious biases, and why hiring outsiders can be a superpower -- Kence Anderson covers a lot of ground.
The Association for Advancing Automation (A3) is North America’s largest automation trade association representing more than 1,400 organizations involved in robotics, artificial intelligence, machine vision & imaging, motion control & motors, and related automation technologies.
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