Shortly after accepting this job in March, A3 asked me to help program last week’s Humanoid Robot Forum. Those who had planned the previous year’s Memphis event told me feedback had been uniformly positive, but for one notable question: where was the skepticism? Fair enough.
Anyone who tells you with absolute certainty how we’ll look back on this moment in 10-15 years is peddling the same snake oil as any black turtlenecked, fake deep-voiced Steve Jobs wannabe dotting the backless wood benches of coffee shops across Palo Alto. I've always encouraged a diverse range of voices — that includes viewpoints, approaches, backgrounds, and genders, among others. I can always do better.
Maybe it’s good to have something to work toward next year. As for 2025, however, I think it was a nice mix, including a pragmatic approach already deployed at scale (Diligent Robotics), a more familiar piece of warehouse machinery adopting certain human characteristics (Cobot), modularity (Apptronik), and a true bridging of the gap between human and robot kind (Psyonic).
Oh look, Automated officially has its own URL: automated.fm
The venture world is perfectly positioned to inflate a humanoid robot bubble. This statement isn’t a discounting of the technology. Incredibly smart people make amazing breakthroughs every day, and there’s a lot of promising work being done in universities, research institutes, and companies around the world.
But success does not fortify a bubble. At a certain point, the thing has to pop, leaving a few success stories to weather the storm. It's physics. Here’s a dirty little truth I think a lot of people don’t want to admit: we’re still so early on in all of this, it’s hard to say if any of those long-term winners are companies we’d recognize today. The timeline for scaling increasingly appears to be far longer than originally promised.
Roberta Nelson Shea is a force of nature. She commands a room, cuts to the heart of the matter, and then utterly disarms you with a one-liner like, “Nowadays you can have ‘cage-free’ [robots], which I think only applies to chickens."
My first exposure to Universal Robots’ global technical compliance officer was also my first Engelberger Awards, and all the pomp it entails. While Nelson Shea appeared to enjoy the well-deserved victory lap, safety and compliance are not — generally speaking — the paths one chooses when seeking out a career in the spotlight. (Robotics newsletter writer, on the other hand…)
It’s clear from speaking with her for even a few moments that she’s one of the lucky ones — those among us who truly found their calling.
Baby Groot’s head is glowing in the late afternoon light. It’s ethereal, angelic even, and quite frankly, it’s hard to pay attention to anything else in the frame — human, robot, or otherwise. But the little tree-bodied galactic guardian had its moment in the proverbial spotlight back in spring 2021, when it was revealed to be the subject of Project Kiwi, an extraordinarily sophisticated bit of Disney Imagineering.
Groot was, in part, the baby of the man sitting to his immediate right on this Teams call. Scott LaValley’s got one of those resumes that makes teenage me want to ask adult me where I went wrong. I mean, look, I have a pretty cool job, but come on.
Unitree kicked off the week by acknowledging a security vulnerability discovered in its popular Go2 and B2 humanoid robots. Researchers last week referred to the exploit as a “self-spreading robot malware,” owing to its ability to take advantage of the robots’ Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) connectivity. “An infected robot can simply scan for other Unitree robots in BLE range and automatically compromise them,” the team notes on GitHub, “creating a robot botnet that spreads without user intervention.” At the time of the Monday post, Unitree claimed to have fixed a majority of the issues, with corresponding updates rolling out to customers “in the near future.”
Sometimes you get hit with a story that reads like a word cloud of all the topics you’ve been writing about of late. This one certainty ticks a lot of boxes: NVIDIA, DeepMind, Hugging Face, and even Disney Research are all here, helping me surpass my week’s SEO goals in one fell swoop. The new, open-source Newton Physics engine was jointly developed by NVIDIA, Google DeepMind and Disney Research, and then made available via the Isaac Lab. As the polymathian name suggests, the warp-based engine helps robots’ physical intelligence learn real-world physics in simulation.
I’ve been following Neptune Robotics since their $17.25 million raise in mid-2022. The Singapore-based firm perfect encapsulates the “three Ds” automation evangelists are always going on about. I would say that cleaning the hull of a massive cargo ship sits firmly in the cross section between dull, dirty, and dangerous. I learned the word “biofouling” the last time I wrote about the company and subsequently learned that it (made up of organic matter like algae and barnacles) increases ship fuel consumption by 15% on average. Neptune just raised another $52 million in a Series B led by Granite Asia for a robot that scrapes the stuff off of ship hulls. Massive shipping firm, NYK, was also involved in the round.
This adorable little bugger is Dot, Doordash’s new last-mile delivery robot, which will be starting pilots in Tempe and Mesa, Arizona. For a decade now, the Southwestern state has pushed aggressive legislation making it a friendly hub for autonomous vehicle testing. It’s a gambit that has, quite frankly, paid off. While cities like San Francisco and New York hog the spotlight, Waymo, Cruise, and Aurora have taken advantage of Arizona’s pro-self-driving policies. The food delivery service is up next with this little Cozy Coupe-style bot designed to squeeze through tough spaces. You can take a peek under Dot’s cheerful little hood over here.
During Automate, the big “U” word was “uncertainty,” pertaining to the impacts the current administration’s economic policy would ultimately have on robotics and manufacturing. While it seems uncertainty continues to be a kind of strategy unto itself, we may be inching closer to a partial answer, as the U.S. government has formally launched a Section 232 investigation (under the Trade Expansion Act of 1962), which allows the president to enact tariffs on imports that have national security implications. In other words, tariffs could be coming for robots. The Department of Commerce has opened a 21-day window for feedback that closes October 17.
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.
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.
