Happy National Robotics Week to those who celebrate. This year, we decided to spend the holiday capturing a couple of months’ worth of Automated Podcasts. The show has largely been remote since its inception, owing – in part – to my decision to move to the woods a few years back.
But robotics is very much a physical business demanding an in-person presence, so we’re doing what we can to capture that interview immediacy you only get when you sit down directly across from someone.
As I write this, we’ve recorded episodes with CSAIL's Daniela Rus, Locus Robotics' Rick Faulk, Clara Vu (Symbotic, Veo, iRobot), MIT/Toyota Research Institute's Russ Tedrake, Tatum Robotics' Samantha Johnson, MIT’s Yoel Fink, and Generalist AI’s Andy Barry. Huge thanks to everyone who sat down for an interview, those who helped us book, and, of course, MassRobotics for a Herculean coordination effort.
That includes last night’s first-ever Automated happy hour. Thank you everyone for such a warm welcome. This is an incredibly exciting time to be covering this space, and it’s great to see the work of pushing robotics and physical AI is in such great hands.
We’ve got one day left to go as we release this newsletter out into the world, including another podcast episode, startup interviews, and some surprises. You’ll find a feature based on Rus’ interview below, highlighting some of the incredible research coming out of CSAIL, from capturing wild whale births to using GenAI for robot design.
Also, in honor of all the Beantown fun, this week’s podcast guest is Zachary Jackowski, who heads up Boston Dynamics’ Atlas team. If you’re curious at all about what the company is doing in the humanoid space, you’re going to want to tune into that one.
And with that, I’m back home for a day to do laundry and then it’s off to Modex with me. See you in Atlanta.
Released in 1970, Songs of the Humpback Whale captured the public imagination. The collection of bio-acoustic field recordings went on to move 100,000 copies, becoming the best-selling environmental album of all time. It would also prove a foundational text for the creation of the era’s Save the Whales movement.
The album’s creator, Roger Payne, remained devoted to cetaceans for the remainder of his life before passing away in 2023. Daniela Rus recounts a talk given by the marine biologist at a meeting of MacArthur Fellows nearly two decades back as sparking her own interest in the topic.
“I still remember going up to Roger to say, ‘hey, I love your whale songs,’” Rus says, “Can I make you some robots?” Drones soon replaced paper, pencil, and a pair of binoculars in the daunting task of documenting whales off the coast of Argentina.
Rus and Payne crossed paths again a few years later at a Harvard workshop. This time, the questions grew more profound.
“What if we could someday understand what whales are saying to each other?” Rus asks. “What is part of the communication mechanism, the vocalization, and the song of whales?”
The collaboration between MIT CSAIL (Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory) and Project CETI recently answered these questions in surprising ways. Machine learning revealed far more complex nuances of sperm whale language than previously understood by science. Researchers described the discovery of a “sperm whale phonetic alphabet” and were able to determine what they were going to “say” next, based on speech patterns — i.e., predictive text for sperm whales.
Longstanding partnerships like these continue to bear fruit.
Last month, Project SETI revealed that drones had captured something extraordinarily rare — to human eyes, at least. A group of sperm whales huddled around a massive cloud of blood. Concern soon gave way to wonder, when the researchers realized what they were witnessing: a birth. Non-kin whales had gathered to assist with the birth — a phenomenon they’d not previously witnessed.
Cross-disciplinary work has been a throughline for much of Rus’ work as the director of CSAIL. Throughout our nearly hour-long conversation, we discussed breakthroughs in self-driving cars (ground penetrating radar to spot road landmarks under the snow) and liquid neural networks. We unfortunately didn’t get time to discuss the sea turtle robot, Crush, or the 3D printed bubble robots.
Last week, Saronic hit a $9.25 billion valuation, courtesy of a fresh $1.75 billion in funding. Venture capital has poured in on the strength of the firm’s partnership with the U.S. Navy and the promise to deliver more than 20 autonomous ships by 2027. It’s an ambitious goal — enough to have more than doubled the company’s $4 billion valuation since early last year.
As conflict has raged, demand for domestically produced warships has spiked. The proposed massive 2027 $1.5 trillion defense spending plan calls for Congress to approve the construction of 41 new ships, including 18-battle and 16-non-battle naval vessels. While Saronic has ambitious plans to address these figures — including the construction of new facilities — it won’t be able to go it alone.
In February, the company announced a partnership that will bring Path Robotics’ automated welding systems to its Franklin, Louisiana shipyard — the former home of the 100-acre Gulf Craft facility. Within days of that deal, Path announced a partnership with barge builder LAD and a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with HII, the largest military ship builder in the U.S. (the latter, notably, was a promise to “explore the integration” of Path’s tech).
Among the more remarkable bits of all this — at least from where Path stands — is that this whole shipbuilding business is a fairly new undertaking for the Columbus, Ohio-based robotic welding firm.
“The last 18 months have been extremely busy,” CEO Andy Lonsberry tells me. He describes the startup’s early journey as one focusing primarily on small- and medium-size business, primarily operating in automotive. As 2024 turned into 2025, however, Path began looking at larger, more complex customers with even higher quality standards.
“We opened up new verticals in defense, shipbuilding, AI data centers, energy infrastructure, and then also the classic kind of construction mining equipment in 2025. We've just seen massive market pull, massive market adoption.”
When custom gloves got too expensive, Samantha Johnson taught herself how to sew. Much of her role as CEO of Tatum Robotics has played out similarly since the startup spun out of a student thesis at the height of the pandemic.
“I was a bit ambitious, I will say,” Johnson tells me. “I definitely went into it thinking it might be a little bit easier than it ended up being. But I think also because it was COVID, I had this very forgiving space to innovate. Nobody was watching me. I could make a lot of mistakes along the way. I set many a PCB to smoke. I could get a 3D printer and just print and print and print and figure out what I was doing.”
Johnson’s higher ed journey began with wet lab work, but a desire to address accessibility brought her into the robotics fold. “I got into robotics not necessarily because of the robotics themselves, but because of what they could do,” she explains. “I saw this problem of deafblind people can't communicate, and thought robotics could be the solution to that. And that's sort of how I found my way to robotics.”
Deafblindness — a combination of profound sight and hearing loss — is believed to impact around 0.2% of the global population. Those with the condition rely on their sense of touch for communication, utilizing a tactile form of sign language that requires another person in immediate proximity. When the pandemic forced institutions to social distance, much of the community lost access to this vital means of communication — many suddenly and without explanation.
After determining that no off-the-shelf robot hand would fit her needs, Johnson threw herself into robotics in order to build a tactile sign language communication device. The design required elements like flexible tendons not regularly found on industrial effector systems.
“Who really has skills in deafblind robotics?” she rhetorically posits. “Probably nobody. It really has been such a journey and I feel very lucky to have the team that we've had surrounded that we're all learning together.”
A couple of bits jumped out at me from Generalist’s recent Gen-1 model launch. First is the insistence that it’s not a tweaked language model “with robot actions bolted on,” but instead “99% trained from scratch.” It’s not a claim I recall seeing from the competition, though I’ve been reading a lot of output from physical AI firms of late, and may have missed similar statements. I would be curious to hear from more folks in the space whether this is a route more companies ought to consider — “rip it up and start again,” to quote Edwyn Collins. The other big piece is the emphasis on method agnosticism, which certainly rings true. I will say there does seem to be something of a consensus that robot training is going to require a lot of data from a lot of different sources. While some in the space seem more attached to some methodologies than others, the category is moving so quickly that one has to maintain an open mind. On that note, we just finished recording a podcast episode with Generalist cofounder and CTO, Andy Barry, during our Boston jaunt. I'll break that out for you in feature form in next week's newsletter.
You could say that industrial robotics’ ship has finally come in. I’m not suggesting anyone actually do it, I’m just saying you could, and technically be correct. The White House began prioritizing beefing up the country’s Naval defense well before recent conflicts escalated to a fever pitch. A massive defense spending windfall is creating huge opportunity for those involved in automating shipbuilding, as evidenced by the Path Robotics feature published just above. Following Path’s…trail… GrayMatter Robotics this week announced its own memorandum of understanding (MOU) with U.S. shipbuilding giant HII.
As noted with the earlier deal, such an MOU signing finds the parties exploring ways to work together, moving forward. Per GrayMatter, “HII and GrayMatter Robotics will work to identify and potentially pursue future opportunities in four areas that include autonomous shipbuilding capability development, integration of GMR technologies with other shipbuilding technology initiatives, workforce training to extend automation, and acceleration and scaling of unmanned system production. Together with other innovative shipbuilding technologies, GMR would augment the shipbuilding workforce, automate structural production, and accelerate throughput to advance national security objectives.”
These small, simple robots aren’t much in the intelligence department. In fact, they thrive on vibes. The particle-sized systems are devoid of sensors, processors, electronics, and most of the other components that immediately spring to mind when imaging robots of virtually all embodiments. Their behavior is instead governed by what Georgia Tech assistant professor Boleai Deng refers to as “mechanical intelligence.” They respond to vibrations and the geometries of other components, moving in tandem in a manner the researchers compare to bird flocks. “Each unit can be very dumb and follow simple rules,” Deng explains. “But when you combine enough of them, a sort of intelligence begins to emerge.”
OpenAI releases a spate of policy proposals to prepare for an upcoming "super intelligence," including, "exploring new approaches such as taxes related to automated labor."
Zachary Jackowski (Boston Dynamics) - January's Atlas product launch required a ground-up rethinking from Jackowski's team at Boston Dynamics.
Ranjay Krishna (Ai2/UW)- Ai2 researcher/University of Washington assistant professor, Ranjay Krishna, discusses the power of training robots in simulation.
Erik Nieves (Plus One) - Plus One's cofounder and CEO joins us backstage at the A3 Business Forum to discuss labor, humanoids, and keeping people in the loop.
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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