Greetings from a remarkably warm and sunny late-September Seattle evening. We've just wrapped up our second Humanoid Robot Forum as I write this, and are rolling into day one of our inaugural Focus event. I'll debrief you on both next week, when I've come up for air — though you'll still find a couple of nuggets from the HRF stage in this week's roundup below. So, enjoy a fittingly humanoid-centric edition of Automated, and remember, the owls are not what they seem.
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A few minutes into our interview, Rodney Brooks offers a cautionary tale. What, precisely, the legendary roboticist is cautioning against, however, is up for interpretation. It could be humanoid robots, generally, or specifically bipedalism. Maybe it’s about not mixing different kinds of liquor — or, perhaps, he’s preemptively warning against inviting the Robust.AI CTO to your next black-tie event.
“I was 25 feet away from a well-known humanoid two weeks ago,” he chuckles. “It was at a cocktail party. No one was interested in it. I said to someone, ‘hey, why don’t we go try robot tipping?’ She said, ‘yeah.’ We weren’t really going to do it, but we turned to look at the robot, and at that moment, it fell flat on its face.”
(Robot tipping, for those not from the American Midwest, is not a reference to slipping the mechatronic bartender a buck for making your double a triple.)
It wouldn’t be proper to classify Brooks as an outright humanoid hater. He was, after all, the driving force behind Rethink, the company that gave the world the humanlike Baxter robot back in 2011. For reasons Brooks is quite candid about during our conversation, Baxter would ultimately have a much greater impact in the research world than the industrial settings for which it was originally designed, leading the company to cease operations in 2018.
If you stumble into a laundromat somewhere in the United States, there’s a chance — albeit an infinitesimally small one — you might encounter an early version of Dyna’s robot. Keep your distance, and you can watch the system in action, performing an essential link in the laundry chain that is nearly always performed by human hand. Get within, say, a foot of the robot, however, and it will stop. No one wants a human flesh bag within the swinging distance of two metal appendages.
Laundromats are the one pilot founder Lindon Gao is ready to discuss, and even that part of the conversation is left intentionally vague. Announcing pilot partners is a big, resource intensive process unto itself. We do know, however, that Dyna didn’t walk around the neighborhood trying to hard sell ma and pop coin-op laundries on hiring a robot folder.
Rather, the nature of the deployments seems to revolve around locations that process commercial laundry by the pound. These are spots that wash bedding and pillowcases for hotels, and blankets and uniforms for airlines in bulk. In other words, it’s precisely the sort of laundromats that would most benefit from automating folding the way the industry has both washing and drying.
Missed my chat with Apptronik CEO Jeff Cardenas at Tuesday’s Humanoid Robot Forum? First of all: how dare you? Second of all: I forgive you. So much so, in fact, that I wrote about it here. You’ll also be able to catch the full interview audio as a bonus episode of the podcast in the near future, because I think you’re neat. One of the bigger bits of info I managed to squeeze out of the exec is the Austin-based company’s plans to show off the latest version of its Apollo humanoid at some point this year. "We’ve been working heavily with Google DeepMind," Cardenas told me. "We have robots at a variety of sites with Google and have been working at the integration with Apollo and Gemini and really trying to push the state of the art forward. There’s a lot of exciting results we haven’t shown yet. We’ll show a lot more, hopefully soon."
A month-and-a-half after announcing a $20 million raise, OpenMind is debuting the beta version of OM1 Beta, the “first open-source OS for intelligent robots.” Put in even more elevator pitch-friendly terms, the Silicon Valley-based AI startup is positioning the play as robotics’ “Android moment.” I suspect the folks behind ROS and DeepMind might take some issue with that particular framing, but the broader point here is that OM1 is designed to be hardware agnostic, while supporting popular AI models, including OpenAI, Gemini, DeepSeek, and xAI. OpenMind adds that, “It lets developers install fully autonomous software on robots without being locked into a single ecosystem or forced to reinvent the wheel.”
Diligent cofounder and CEO Andrea Thomaz kicked off A3's second Humanoid Robot Forum Tuesday with a keynote discussing the startup's journey from University of Texas lab to hospitals across the U.S. The exec also took the time to announce that the company was chosen to be a part of the first MassRobotics/AWS/NVIDIA cohort designed to offer "deep technical guidance, compute resources, and access to a global robotics ecosystem so teams can move from promising prototypes to enterprise-grade deployments." When I pointed out to Thomaz that Diligent may be a little far along to qualify as "promising prototype," she told me, "The AI models that we have working in production today are VLMs. They're using foundation models, primarily for perception tasks. The whole field of robotics is moving towards VLAs and world models and being able to end-to-end produce actions from foundation models. That is our next step in the AI roadmap, as well. We're partnering and collaborating with some of the smartest minds at AWS and NVIDIA to help bring that to fruition."
It's been about four months since I last caught up with Scott LaValley. At the time, the former Walt Disney Principal Imagineer — well-known for his "Baby Groot" (née Project Kiwi) work — had just debuted the first renders of Yogi, the child-like home robot from his new startup, Cartwheel. LaValley had a lot more Yogi to show off on LinkedIn last week, including video of the home robot dancing, accompanied by the note, "This isn’t animation [...] Every move you see was generated by our motion language model (MLM), the same system that can turn text or voice into endless, expressive motion." Click the button below, and you'll get the disclaimer. The movements are truly that fluid. I'll be chatting with LaValley before by redeye back home tonight, so look for a longer piece on Yogi and Cartwheel in next week's newsletter, if I don't accidentally sleep through next week.
Succinctly named Humanoid closed last week by debuting its new prototype, HMND 01 Alpha. The London-based startup says the system was built in seven months, laying claim to the title of “fastest-developed humanoid to date.” That’s one of those big, squishy, not entirely fact-checkable claims, owing to the porousness of concepts like humanoids — not to mention the sheer number of competitors in the category that seem to be popping up every day. The main thing that stood out to me about Humanoid’s approach since seeing the company speak in London over the summer (accompanied by some CG teasers), is its modular approach to mobility, with a torso that mounts to either legs or a wheeled base, depending on the demands of the environment and the task at hand (though last week's debut focused solely on wheels).
Former colleague and current friend Natasha Mascarenhas is among those at The Information reporting that Oslo-based 1X is looking to raise as much as $1 billion in new funding. Word arrives from a trio of sources who apparently spoke directly with CEO, Bernt Børnich. The company, which also has offices in the Bay Area, following its January acquisition of Kind Humanoid, has worked to set itself apart from the growing army of humanoid firms by focusing on the home first. While it’s an easy way to distinguish itself from the pack, that's where the "easy" bit stops. Most humanoid proponents agree the form factor makes sense in the domestic setting…eventually. Several obstacles make it a far more challenging scenario than industrial use cases, including safety, price, and unstructured environments.
Rodney Brooks (Robust.AI)- When I want a robot reality check, I go to Rodney Brooks, who cofounded iRobot and Rethink, after spending a 25 years teaching the subject at MIT.
Deepu Talla (NVIDIA)- Just over a decade ago, NVIDIA got out of mobile processing and into robotics. The move is paying off in the form of the chipmaker’s Jetson platform.
Melonee Wise (Fetch Founder)- When we recorded this, Wise was Agility's CPO. Who can say where the Robot Ninja will strike next?
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.
