2.12.26

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In the Garage

If you’re a fan of the podcast, you’re aware of my mild obsession with the hubs that birthed contemporary robotics. Willow Garage has been a particular source of fascination, with the push and pull between research and commercialization that played out in the heart of Silicon Valley, not all that long ago.

The spores scattered in the wind, when the company shuttered in 2014, leaving another generation of inspirational startups in its wake. There were the spinoffs, like Redwood Robotics, Suitable Technologies, and Industrial Perception — many of whom were hoovered up in Google’s massive robotics buying spree (another story for another time). And then there were the ex-pat startups, like Fetch, Savioke, and Zipline.

Founded in 2012 as a 501(c)(3), the Open Source Robotics Foundation (OSRF) is its own unique beast. The non-profit was designed as a steward for ROS, the robot operating system that coalesced as Willow Garage looked to breathe life into early humanoid, PR-2.

Early Automated guest, Helen Greiner, was a member of the OSRF’s founding board of directors, along with Brian Gerkey, who also took up the mantle of foundation CEO. Gerkey joins us this week, as CTO of Intrinsic, a title he picked up a year after Alphabet’s robotics software firm acquired OSRF’s commercial counterpart, the Open Source Robotics Corporation (OSRC).

This week’s episode is a treasure trove of lore for all of you Willowheads out there. We dive into the ROS story and explore the topic of open source robotics, generally. Here’s a fascinating bit from the conversation,

It was never exactly clear what the mission of Willow Garage was. What was amazing is the autonomy that we had to kind of discover and construct that mission as we went along. In the early days, there was actually an autonomous car project, there was an autonomous solar-powered ocean-going boat project, and there was what became the Personal Robotics Project, which, that eventually created ROS and created the PR2.

In 2008, we narrowed it down to personal robotics. That's the big bet that we wanted to take. We set out, and we kind of constructed the mission on the fly. We said, look. We think the highest impact thing we can do here is to accelerate the state of technology development in this industry by providing the smartest, most talented people in the world with the right hardware and software. Let's give them the best hardware and software so that they can start to solve some of these hard problems.

That was what we did with the PR2. We gave the first dozen or so out for free, but then we sold them. It was never going to run Willow Garage on revenue selling those robots, but we did sell another few dozen. The lasting contribution, arguably, has been the software. And in that case, we decided early on that a fundamental proposition is that we're going to make all that software available open source and that became ROS.

Something else many of the conversations have reinforced is that — in some important ways —- robotics remains a small industry. Sure, capital investments are massive, but so many of the players (and Playters) have been in this for a long time. People know each other and —- for the most part — seem supportive of one another's work.

Today's top names studied in the same labs, interned together, and have experienced so many of the same highs and lows. There's collaboration and camaraderie. There are beefs, too, of course, competition, and trade secrets, but largely speaking, success isn't a zero-sum game, and even the stumbles have helped sign a light forward. 

The robots that inhabit the halls of TRI’s Silicon Valley offices never appear too preoccupied with adhering to any humanoid standard of beauty. Wheels, legs, torso mounted upside-down to ceiling gantries — its all fair game. While Toyota’s research wing boasts high profile partnership with top humanoid manufacturers, including Atlas-maker, Boston Dynamics, many of the systems you’ll find on-site were developed in-house.

“We think that having a complete vertical integration, at least for us right now in terms of doing the research, is very powerful,” TRI’s senior vice president of robotics, Max Bajracharya, tells me on a call this week. “It means we can control every aspect of the robot. We can iterate very, very quickly based on the feedback that we're getting from our team members. We can change the hardware. We can change the compute. In robotics, it's always a highly, highly coupled system. We're optimizing different parts of the system all at the same time.”

For visitors, it means things can look considerably different every time you stop by. When the Automated Podcast popped to record the holiday episode late last year with robotics technology adoption senior manager, Erin McColl, I was struck by what had changed since my previous visit a few years prior. Earlier iterations of the lab sported a partial kitchen, lorded over by a gantry-based system, designed to offer in-house help.

Since then, much of the work — and the robots that perform it — have evolved to a more industrial setting. The move represents both a shift in primary focus for the division and a reprioritization of the possible.

“Our long-term goal is still helping everyone in society, including people in their homes,” says Bajracharya. “But I think one of our key realizations is that we can actually make a lot more progress starting with manufacturing, specifically in helping people in manufacturing, not trying to replace them, but actually giving them a tool that they can use in order to make either their lives better or other people's lives better. And then that's going to directly translate into helping people in society.”

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The wheels of Matic’s recent $60 million raise, says cofounder and president, Mehul Nariyawala, were already in motion before iRobot’s recent industry-altering news. Even among the hottest tech startups, eight-figure raises aren’t exactly an overnight affair. Mutual vetting needs to happen on both sides of the balance sheet, goals set, timelines established, and roadmaps sketched out.

In the case of the hardware startup, a boxy little robot vacuum has to find its way to Silicon Valley floors of those tasked with signing the checks.

“Someone at Sutter Hill Ventures got the robot, and they had previously tried three generations of robot vacuums,” Nariyawala notes on a quick Friday afternoon call. “I believe Pete Schlampp —- who is CEO of Luminary Cloud and managing director at Sutter Hill Ventures — was the first one to get hands on Matic, and he loved it. A few other folks on the team got a little bit of a, little bit of a love inside Sutter Hill Ventures. Just around that time I reached out and then stars aligned, I guess.”

The “three generations of robot vacuums” bit Nariyawala alludes to is a common refrain in the Matic story. It was the thing I kept going back to when we first met up at CES 2022, and it’s the thesis statement of every subsequent review of the company’s first-generation product. Robots have gotten pretty okay at vacuuming our homes after 20+ years, and we’ve seemingly been satisfied.

Roomba has enjoyed a nearly genericized level of brand recognition, akin to a Kleenex or ChapStick, even as it has ceded accessibility to companies selling products at a fraction of the cost. Matic, on the other hand, was looking down the barrel of an $1,800 price point pre-launch (to be fair, there were some discounts from day one, and you can currently nab the product for an admittedly still steep $1,245).

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“Our opinion is that this thing's ready to go,” says Kevin Peterson of Bedrock Robotics’ autonomous driving for heavy equipment. The CTO adds, however, that while the technology is mostly where it should be, the Bay Area-based construction startup is approaching commercialization deliberately. 

“We're going to take time,” he tells me. “It's a business and it's a technology and you have to make sure it's really, really robust, performant, and useful. All of that polish takes a lot of time, but it's not really a science project in the way that some of these things have been.” 

The company’s first offering is Bedrock Operator, a hardware system that retrofits standard heavy construction equipment with autonomous navigation. This arrives courtesy of eight cameras, GPS, and LiDAR, that are distributed along a roof rack that is mounted atop the vehicle’s operator cab. A combination of on-board edge and cloud computing gets the system where it needs to go. 

While eventual plans will cover various different machines, the current work is focused on excavators. Their pivoting bodies and earth-moving claw arms present an added challenge for autonomous systems navigating in uncertain terrain. “It’s a big arm, essentially,” says Peterson. “I think of it as five-degree freedom arm with, it has tracks, you know, tracks wheels. It's fine. And so all the techniques that you're seeing around doing manipulation apply.” 

While it’s not shipping, Bedford’s Operator system has been doing a good deal of work out in the field, according to the CTO.  

“If I were to go visit one of your test sites right now with one of these systems in an excavator, it would be working pretty closely to what you would expect it to be in its final version,” says Peterson. “We have machines that have been running on customer sites autonomously. We finished up a job that we like to talk about last fall where we did 10% of the work for the customer. And big job. It's a big manufacturing facility. We did 65,000-70,000 cubic yards of work.” 

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See You Later, Robert Playter

In a memo to staff Tuesday, Boston Dynamics Robert Playter announced that he is stepping down as CEO, effective immediately. He will leave the company outright on February 27. The company is currently searching for a suitable replacement, with Amanda McMaster serving as interim chief executive until the role is filled.

Playter has been with the company for more than 30 years, becoming the second CEO in Boston Dynamics' history when founder Marc Raibert vacated the role at the beginning of 2020. That transition occurred as the company pushed to commercialize the first product in its three-decade history, the quadrupedal Spot. 

The monetization push marked a major shift for the long-time research-driven MIT spinout. The pivot was largely driven by then-owner Softbank, which would later sell the company to South Korean auto giant, Hyundai. Since then, Boston Dynamics has unveiled two additional commercial products, the truck-unloading Stretch and humanoid robot, Atlas. 

"Boston Dynamics has been the ride of a lifetime," Playter writes in the staff letter. "What this place has become has exceeded anything I could have ever imagined all those years ago in our funky lab in the basement of the MIT Media Lab. We have created something truly special here, showing that greatness comes from talent, commitment, and teamwork rather than superstar status. Many of you have heard me say that whether in sports or in business, all of my most rewarding experiences have come as a teammate. Leading this team has been the honor of my life."

The company offered me the following statement on the news,

Robert Playter is an icon of the global robotics industry, and the entire Boston Dynamics team wishes to express our sincere appreciation and gratitude for his leadership. From the earliest days of hopping robots, to the world’s first quadrupeds, to spearheading the entire humanoid industry, Playter made his mark as a pioneer of innovation. He transformed Boston Dynamics from a small research and development lab into a successful business that now proudly calls itself the global leader in mobile robotics. He will be sorely missed, but we hope he enjoys some well-deserved time off. Thanks, Rob.

Playter has been a foundational member of the company from the outset, and led Boston Dynamics' transformation from pure research entity to commercial robot manufacturer. I sat down with him when he was first named CEO (and several times since), and hope to do so again in the coming weeks to reflect on his time at the firm. Interim CEO McMaster has served as Boston Dynamics chief financial officer since February 2020.

Billion Dollar Bipeds

Apptronik Wednesday announced a massive funding extension, bringing its Series A round to nearly $1 billion. The newly closed $520 million Series A-X follows 2025’s oversubscribed initial $415 million, for a total of $935 million. New investors AT&T Ventures and John Deere joined existing names, including B Capital, Google, Mercedes-Benz, and PEAK6. While the company didn’t quite hit its end-of-2025 goal to debut the follow-up to Apollo, the latest version of the company’s humanoid is on track to arrive this year. Some of the massive funding will be carved out to help scale production and deployment of the Austin-based robotics firm’s systems in industrial settings. 

That includes a handful of already announced partnerships, like Mercedes-Benz, logistics giant GXO, and Detroit-based circuit board manufacturer Jabil. Apptronik has also inked a high-profile partnership with Google DeepMind that makes Apollo one of the flagship hardware deployments for its Gemini Robotics embodied AI work. “With the backing of our longstanding investors and strategic partners, we’re poised to unveil the newest version of Apollo and maximize the impact of embodied AI across industries,” says CEO Jeff Cardenas. “Together, we’re transforming workflows, reimagining factory floors, and writing a new chapter for next-generation humanoid robots that are designed and built to drive meaningful societal progress.”

No Way Home

How can you not root for a face like Yogi’s? Sadly, however, he seemingly must return to his home planet, as Reno-based Cartwheel Robotics calls it a day. Founder/CEO Scott LaValley announced the news over on social media. Disney’s former principal imagineer cited the startup's inability to find “the right capital” as the reason for closing up shop. He noted that, while Cartwheel’s robots captured press and investor imagination, it wasn’t what the company required to take them from laboratory to real production. “Yogi attracted real attention,” LaValley writes. “It felt fresh. It felt different. People genuinely loved it. We were in deep discussions with major CVCs, institutional investors, and global customers. But in hardware, capital is oxygen.”

It was clear from day one that Cartwheel had set some supremely lofty goals for itself in the form of the bipedal home companion robot. All the while, it maintained a modest headcount and accomplished a lot with relatively little capital. LaValley again, "After operating as a revenue-funded company, we made the deliberate decision to pivot toward building a full humanoid. A full-stack Yogi came together in under a year. With just $3M in outside capital and a team of seven, we built a complete robotics lab and a humanoid platform — from custom actuators and sensors to behaviors and personality."

LaValley promises to reveal more about his next project “shortly.”

Sticking the Landing

I’ve been pushing for more transparency in robot videos for a few years now. It’s become increasingly pressing as the industry further blurs the line between lab demo and car commercial. Many manufacturers have been emboldened, as humanoid robots, in particular, have become regular features in the mainstream news, creating impossible expectations around what these technologies can actually do in the real world — let alone repeatedly and at scale. If you're among the dedicated few who stuck around to the bitter end of our holiday episode, you caught the mini "blooper reel" set to the tune of "Jingle Bells" (if not, don't worry, it's still there). There is, of course, the lizard part of my brain that simply enjoys watching people and things slip and fall hilariously. More than that, however, false starts offer insight into just how difficult it is to stick the landing. With that in mind, go check out "one last run in the sun" for the electric Atlas prototype from Boston Dynamics and the RAI Institute.

Spare Parts

• Symbotic picks up autonomous forklift firm, Fox.
• $32 million in funding and a few extra letters for Trener (formerly T-) Robotics.
• Hungarian firm Allonic's hand gets leg up with a $7.2 million pre-seed raise. 
• Corvus Robotics launches sub-zero drones for cold chain warehouses.
• Weave's first robot is coming home.
• Ambi expands its robot application offerings.

Now Playing on Automated Pod 

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. 

Colin Angle (Familiar Machines & Magic) - iRobot's cofounder discusses the Roomba-maker's recent headlines and pulls back the curtain on his new startup.

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