Something I’ve learned time and again across my weird and winding career: success is not a fixed point. It’s an abstraction that fluctuates like the weather. Patterns emerge on macro levels, but the results at any moment are the product of countless unseen forces. The best one can do is maintain goals, while understanding these, too, will evolve.
The closest I’ve come to running my own company was an underground comics journalism website that lost me money for the better part of a decade. This is one of the many reasons I recommend taking my business advice with substantial salt. My own guidance is gleaned from observing trends available to anyone who cares to look.
A combination of studying precedent and access to very smart people hopefully combine to form the kind of pragmatism that should be foundational to the job of tech journalism. Sometimes I stick the landing. Other times, not so much.
I consumed too much punk music and French existentialism in my youth to fully renounce my cynicism. Even so, I’ve found myself caught up in a tech reality distortion field or two. It may, unfortunately, be impossible to avoid altogether. It is, after all, a belief in technology’s capacity for change that leads many to give their lives over in hopes of furthering positive outcomes.
The trick, while watching the demos, sitting through the keynotes, and interviewing the top salespeople, is never letting a best-case scenario detract from the possibility of all others.
These subjects are top of mind in light of ongoing reports of delays around one much anticipated robotic system. While “moonshot” has lost some luster in recent years, it’s important to recalibrate expectations.
Sometimes moonshots make it. Take, for instance, the term’s namesake. What truly makes a moonshot a moonshot, however, is the overwhelming likelihood of failure, because it's really, really hard. Really, really hard does not mean not worth trying. Nor does it mean that there is no value to be gained when things don’t land exactly as expected. Success, as a non-businessperson said, paragraphs ago, is not a fixed point. Plenty of moonshots failed their mission entirely, while still furthering other research and fields.
Again, I’m not a businessperson, but it strikes me that transparency is generally a good policy in terms of expectations. Oftentimes we’re left to fall back on best-case scenario projections from stakeholders, evangelists, and some analysts. As we inch toward the end of this calendar year, I would love to ask this question of the top humanoid firms: In terms of units produced, what constitutes a successful 2026? How about 2027? Is there a number you’re willing to share as far as what would make for a successful 2030 and beyond?
Would anything short of these numbers constitute failure on some level?
These are the kinds of questions journalists ask, knowing full well that the subject may have no interest or see no benefit in sharing. These are internal figures, and, again, there’s no fixed point. But it’s something I’ll have my eye on, as the space evolves.
These figures aren't just connected to notions of transparency or accountability. They'll also, hopefully, go a ways toward calibrating realistic expectations for an ever-changing target.
To quote a very sweaty, clapping Steve Ballmer, last week’s Qualcomm/Arduino acquisition news was about five things, “Developers, developers, developers, developers, developers.” Hardware developers are a key piece of the tech ecosystem, which thus far haven’t been a core competency for a processor giant, whose primary business dealings are engaged with the world’s largest mobile companies.
Earlier this week, I spoke with Manvinder (Manny) Singh, a longtime Qualcomm VP, about the pending deal. He noted that, while the semiconductor firm’s ubiquitous mobile presence has allowed for diversification into categories like automotive and XR (extended reality), the nature of the IoT market requires a wholly different approach.
“IoT happens to be a very different type of business. It involves many, many customers who buy things off the shelves and build prototypes and products based off that,” Singh tells me. “We were not very good at connecting with the mass market, to be really open about it, and we realized that. A lot of our business relied on direct communication and business relationships where we handheld companies, including drone and robotics companies that built products based on our platform.”
“You don’t go out of your way to be a skeptic,” Brad Porter notes at the beginning of our hour-long podcast chat. It’s not that no one wants to be associated with the s-word, so much as the idea that one needs to get there in good faith. Blindly accepting and rejecting novel concepts out of hand are two sides of the same misguided coin.
This is where past precedent and industry expertise come to bear. The Cobot CEO possesses both in spades, with a track record that includes 13.5 years as an executive at Amazon, co-leading industrial robotics deployment efforts that recently crossed the one million unit milestone.
Porter’s own public skepticism about humanoids is partly a product of his explorations into deploying the form factor in a warehouse setting.
“I felt that it was worth putting out content to explain what I had seen, thinking deeply about humanoids at Amazon,” he tells me. “It was a little bit ahead of the curve, and I thought about this a lot in 2018. I think Agility had shown some really impressive bipedalism. That technology looked like it was starting to be viable. The Humanoid Grand Challenge had just taken place. So, we thought about it a lot.”
After staying at my house over the weekend, my mom will tell you, the struggle to reach the high shelves is real. I keep my drinking glasses too high. Add it to list of things I need to work on. Warehouses have long contended with a similar issue when inventory time rolls around — what’s the best way to actually get up there and count? While drones have proven a novel solution among those looking to automate that process, I’ve always appreciated Dexory essentially saying, “screw it, we’ll just build a really, really tall robot.” The U.K.-based firm this week announced an equally lofty $165 million Series C. Dexory established North American offices in Nashville after its last round, and also has a presence in the European and APAC markets.
Hey rubber band brain. Yeah, I'm talking to you. If you’re reading this, you know that I’ve made up a new insult based on recently published work from Harvard’s John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS). In this case, the robot’s brain is really four rubber bands, swapped in for sensors, software controls, and a whole bunch of other stuff that would probably just get you into trouble anyway. The positioning of the bands on a peg board "programs" sequential movements. The robot also has a battery and a small motor to propel it, as it stutters, stumbles, and generally ambles its way between obstacles and through mazes. Research lead, Leon Kamp, says, “This is kind of an extreme version of ‘form follows function,’ where functionalities like memory, adaptability, and intelligence can be enabled by geometry and material parameters,” Kamp said.
It seems Figure has finally chosen a side in that great ethical debate of our time: should humanoid robots wear clothes? Pictured above is shiny new Figure 03 robot decked out as a hotel receptionist — one of a factotum of potential roles the well-funded Bay Area firm has floated for its third-gen system. Above all, the videos around the announcement are aimed at showcasing a breadth of potential applications that goes beyond the more familiar factory/warehouse floor. This includes last mile delivery, which Agility has — and Amazon reportedly continues to — experiment with. Also included are package sorting, laundry folding, and cooking. In fact, it appears as though home applications may even be taking priority for the company and the robot, in spite of the added challenges that environment entails. As for my above comments about units produced, the company writes, “BotQ is Figure’s dedicated manufacturing facility designed to scale robot production. BotQ’s first-generation manufacturing line will initially be capable of producing up to 12,000 humanoid robots per year, with the goal of producing a total of 100,000 robots over the next four years.”
The M4 (Multi-Modal Mobility Morphobot) had a nice little viral moment back in 2023, when Caltech debuted video of the drone’s multiple methods of transportation. The transforming system can roll, fly, stand, and even approximate walking. Two years later, the SoCal school’s Center for Autonomous Systems and Technologies (CAST) has joined forces with the UAE’s Technology Innovation Institute (TII) to turn the system into a backpack for a humanoid robot. The X1 system (not to be confused with a 1X system) is essentially a Unitree G1 robot wearing an M4 on its back. The system is designed to work as an all-in-one emergency response team, equipped with its own robotic Swiss Army knife. "The challenge is how to bring different robots to work together so, basically, they become one system providing different functionalities,” says Caltech professor Mory Gharib. “With this collaboration, we found the perfect match to solve this.”
Brad Porter (Cobot)-Longtime Amazon VP, Brad Porter, knows what it takes to deploy robots at scale. He's now doing the same with his own company, Cobot.
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.
On October 21 at 12 PM ET, A3 is partnering with Apera AI for a virtual career fair (it's basically a webinar), as the robotic vision software firm looks to staff more than 50 roles.
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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