Brian Heater
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- Managing Editor, Association for Advancing Automation
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New York, United States
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Articles by Brian Heater
Boston Dynamics' Robot Behavior Director on Atlas's Ever-Evolving Hand
Orthogenesis fell out of favor before the mid-20th century. The fossil record simply didn’t reflect the notion of evolution working in a single direction, toward some grand end. Popular culture never got the memo, of course. It’s much easier to sleep through the night believing you occupy the true pinnacle of 3.7 billion years or so of evolutionary progress. A simple X-ray of my L4-L5 lumbar vertebrae, however, is enough to put a quick lie to any such notions.
RobCo's CEO on Trust Through Simulation
Sell a solution, not a robot. It’s not a novel concept. The term “solution selling” dates to the mid-70s, while the more abstract notion of selling customers on answers no doubt stretches back further. There are moments it feels like a relic butting up against our current physical AI climate, but the equation is simple for industrial robotics: deliver or die. A tremendous level of trust is required before a manufacturer will disrupt the line to incorporate some new piece of automation.
Hello Robot's CEO on the Pragmatism of the Home
Something strange strikes me watching a handful of videos from Aaron Edsinger’s academic career: how many things haven’t changed. I am, of course, familiar with the breakthroughs — particularly those changes to how robots learn, perceive, and follow instruction. The past few years have been a prolonged deluge. But these are the things you anticipate, when you sit down to watch circa-2007 humanoid videos.
How Life After Intel Redefined RealSense
I thank Mike Nielsen for showing up in the first place. Over the years, I’ve dealt with several instances of speakers coming down with a well-timed illness just as some big news was about to hit. When I make some off-handed comment about it being a “bit of a busy week,” he smiles and notes that the previous day was “much worse.” RealSense’s CMO happily obliges when I ask for a bit of his time following his presentation at A3’s Advanced Vision and AI event.
From Apple to Industrial: Maven Robotics' CEO on Automation and Iteration
In 2008, futurist Paul Saffo broke down the processes behind his forecasts in a blog post titled, “Strong Opinions, Weakly Held.” The eponymous philosophy, which he identified as a defining characteristic of his approach since the mid-1980s, remains an oft-repeated Silicon Valley truism decades later. “Allow your intuition to guide you to a conclusion, no matter how imperfect,” Saffo wrote. “This is the ‘strong opinion’ part. Then – and this is the ‘weakly held’ part – prove yourself wrong.
Dynamic Creatures CEO: We Want to Create Robots That You Can Hug
“While I was running the commercial operations at Boston Dynamics,” Marc Theermann explains, “we always had a significant amount of inbound from people saying, ‘Can your robots come dance at my halftime show?’” The sports world got something arguably better over the summer, when an Atlas production model activated the ball for the second half of the Brazil/Norway World Cup game.
AMD Exec: Model Performance is the Wrong Conversation
Salil Raje calls it the “spine.” Conceptually, it may be a bit closer to a robot’s central nervous system — a kind of web linking disparate internal components. “Think about it as the thing that connects up all the devices, basically in that entire system,” says the SVP/GM of AMD's Adaptive and Embedded Computing Group. “Something is powering the system, the communication layer. Today, a lot of times we see an x86 CPU in the spine.
Tether is Working to Decentralize AI and Give Robots Wallets
“Even in robotics, I think that there is there is a lot of potential from the financial side,” Paolo Ardoino says. “But I'm super excited, because I started coding when I was eight. I dreamed about this stuff for a long time. Now it's becoming reality.
Agility Robotics' CEO on the Realities of Real World Humanoid Deployment
Earlier this week, Agility unveiled the most comprehensive update Digit since the biped emerged from an Oregon State lab eight years back. The system highlights the firm’s pragmatic approach to deployment and scaling, relative to much of the humanoid field. It also reconfirms its headstart in terms of real-world use. Digit 5 has been put through its paces behind the scenes, and is now ready for the spotlight, as Agility maintains plans to go public via a SPAC before year’s end.
Agility’s Digit V5 Update Brings More Safety Features, Better Battery, and New Knees
We’ve all changed a lot over the past decade, but few of us have anything on Digit. Even so, Agility’s upgrade from V4 to V5 may represent the single most radical update since the biped first diverged from Oregon State’s headless research robot, Cassie. The newly unveiled version is still recognizable in the abstract – including color scheme and assorted other design elements – but it’s immediately apparent that Agility’s made some major changes this time out.
OpenMind is Working to Put the 'Human' Back Into 'Humanoid
Founders spend years crafting origin stories. A great one can be foundational to a successful pitch deck and the eventual memoir and major motion picture. OpenMind’s tale won’t do much in the way of scoring the physical AI startup its own Hulu miniseries, but there’s something nearly universal in its portrayal of everyday disappointment. Jan Liphardt, a Stanford associate professor of bioengineer, bought three robots for himself and two sons.
Rhoda AI's Deliberate Approach to Hardware
“You might be surprised to hear this,” says Rhoda AI CEO, Jagdeep Singh, “but we think that we could be the first autonomous manipulation capable robot that's deployed at scale.” I am, in fact, surprised to hear it. Beating the dozens of industrial humanoids to market would certainly be a coup for a system that has yet to be announced. Since emerging from stealth in March, Rhoda’s outward facing work has focused on its model training.
Rip it Up and Start Again: Google DeepMind VP on Rewriting the Rules of Robotics
"Faced with information overload,” Marshall McLuhan wrote in 1969, “we have no alternative but pattern recognition." Patterns are how we find signal within the universe’s overwhelming noise. The ability to recognize them is among the world’s most transferable skills, and one of the reasons so many professionals have made successful transitions into robotics. Just the other day, we spoke to a physical AI founder for a forthcoming interview with a background in biochemistry and molecular biology.
Rodney Brooks on the Realities of Deploying Robots
Robust.AI dropped two important — and closely connected — pieces of news last week. The headline grabber was the change in leadership, as longtime CEO Anthony Jules stepped into the chief innovation officer role, with former Fox Robotics CEO Marin Tchakarov taking the chief executive spot. That move was facilitated, in part, by news that the Bay Area company had deployed its 100th Carter unit.
Niantic's Physical AI Spinoff Takes on the Real World, One City at a Time
“Hallucination,” says Inhi Cho Suh, “is a luxury that embodied AI can't afford.” Niantic Spatial’s CEO contrasts the real-world margin for error against those we’ve grown accustomed to dealing with from LLMs and the like. By way of explaining why simulation has become such an important aspect of robotics training, the company notes in a recent blog post, “Running [reinforcement learning] in the real world is hard, because robots do not get many second chances.
From DARPA to SPAC: FORT's Robot Safety Journey
From 2012 to 2015, DARPA set the stage for robotics’ next decade. Teams from across the world built “human-supervised ground robots capable of executing complex tasks in dangerous, degraded, human-engineered environments.” Like the autonomous driving competitions before it, the three-year DARPA Robotics Challenge pushed the state of the art and kickstarted industries. Another key precedent set by predecessors like the Grand Challenge was the importance of centering safety.
Former Agility CEO is Leading CMU's Entrepreneur Effort
“The reason I started my first company was that I interviewed with Google and the interview really didn't go well,” Damion Shelton explains. “When I was walking out of that interview, I got a call from a local entrepreneur who was coincidentally looking to commercialize my lab's work.
Matic's Vacuum Now Responds to Voice and Gestures
Matic Robots gave me early access to a feature Mehul Nariyawalal Nariyawala tells me the company has “been waiting for since 2017” (the year it was founded). The CEO drove the point home with a 30 second video from fall of the following year with an early version running on a prototype named “Jupiter” that more closely resembled a coffeemaker on wheels. Existing customers get access to Cues today, via a firmware push.
Are Simple Tasks and Simpler Hardware the Secret to Scaling Humanoids
Confession time: I got so wrapped up talking about Digit V5’s knees that it kind of overshadowed other tidbits during last month’s interview with Agility cofounder, Jonathan Hurst. It’s also worth highlighting another underreported element of humanoid pilots. Per the roboticist, “If the robot fails, we then have to make sure that somebody is still moving that product and making that happen.” Most of the time that means swapping a malfunctioning unit out with a working one.
Who is Accountable When Self-Driving Goes Wrong? It's Complicated.
Our conversation keeps circling back to a slide Nadine Zurkinden highlighted during her Davos Tech Summit presentation. SAE (Society of Automotive Engineers) International’s Levels of Driving Automation chart. First published in 2014 and revised in 2021, the graphic breaks driving autonomy down in five levels – six, if you count Level 0. Most cars currently on the road fit into the latter category, with features including automatic emergency braking, blind spot warning, and lane departure.
Unitree Prices Long-Awaited IPO at $9B
Unitree Robotics’ long awaited IPO prices the humanoid-maker at 150.8 yuan ($22.34) per share, for a total valuation of 61 billion yuan ($9.04 billion), it confirmed Thursday. The valuation is considerably hire than the initial 50 billion yuan/$7 billion valuation reported last fall. The company is aiming to raise 6.1 billion yuan via the Shanghai Stock Exchange listing.
Generalist Says Hand Swapping Robots Have Grasp on Their Surroundings
Generalist, like much of the physical AI world, is excited about hands. These days, it seems, the startup is particularly interested in what hands tell us humans, about how our models interact — and what they understand about — the world around them.
GigE Vision 3.0 Brings Fast Data Transfers at Mass Market Prices
GigE Vision turned 20 in May. Old enough to vote, buy lottery tickets, and be drafted — but still a year away from legal drinking — the high-speed industrial camera standard interface marked the occasion by celebrating its latest major release. Version 3.0 arrived almost exactly four years after its predecessor, 2.2. The update’s biggest highlight is down to a key element that’s been removed from the standard.
Parkinson's Patients Could Soon Benefit From Wearable Robotics
Today would have been my father’s 74th birthday. I’m not quite sure how it will go — it’s still fresh. I would say the same for the first Father’s Day without him, as that passed a mere two days after he did. I suspect he might have had a laugh at that last bit, however, were the circumstances different. He had a good sense of dark humor until the end, even if he didn’t always have the best timing. He was also sharp until his final day.
Sudo Robotics Hits the (Super) Market
If you had to make a grocery run in Davos, Switzerland on July 3 or 4, there’s a fairly decent chance you were greeted at the door by the above robot. For two days, Sudo AI set up camp in the front of a Migros supermarket location, kitty-corner from the Congress Centre, as it served as the focal point for the inaugural Davos Tech Summit. The station was part of a small-scale robot take over spanning a two block radius amid a cluster of luxury hotels.
Sunday Robotics: Home is Where the Start Is
Sunday Robotics spent its nascent weeks amid a sea of 3D printers stuffed inside a rented house in Mountain View. A stone’s throw from Google and the Stanford campus where its cofounders both studied, the small team had set up shop in the heart of Silicon Valley. That doesn’t mean they were ready to admit to the neighbors they were building robots.
Research, Rockets, Raas: Generative Bionics' Journey to Industrial Humanoids
In 2020, the iCub project forked. Eleven years after the open-source robotics humanoid entered the world, it would be pulled in two distinct directions. Jetpack-sporting iRonCub made a splash last June, when its third official release achieved liftoff. iRonCub3 landed in Nature Communications Engineering and various international publications by hovering with stability at around 50 cm (~20 inches) off the ground.
Walden Robotics Touts People Centric Physical AI
Midway through our discussion, Dave Johnson points me to a quote press quote from Gil Pratt. I’m pretty sure this is on the one he means, “Walden is where a groundbreaking set of inventions by the team at TRI will now be applied to address real-world needs.
Inside UCSD's Successful Humanoid-Performed Gallbladder Surgery
The procedure is a cholecystectomy — a standard gallbladder removal. The patient, a zonked-out pig. UCSD Healthcare Network members Drs. Ryan Broderick and Shanglei Liu are present to perform the operation. That last bit, however, is where things get a bit tricky. Both surgeons are present in the room with the porcine patient, but their operations are happening in a technological parallel. Even this isn’t a remarkable element in and of itself.
Sanctuary, Psyonic, and Kinisi Founders Discuss Humanoid Hands
We closed both days of this year’s Humanoid Robot Forum with three-person panels, designed to offer a bigger picture of the industry halfway through 2026. It’s a nice way to balance a series of one-person presentations, engaging in conversation, while taking a pragmatic look at the challenges the form factor currently faces.
Can Exoskeletons Benefit From Situational Awareness?
When you attend as many robotics and physical AI events as I do, presentations have a way of blending into one another. It’s not a lack of good insights, so much as the difficulty of introducing novel views of familiar subjects. After watching his talk on exoskeletons on the stage I hosted at the Davos Tech Summit, I pulled Loris Roveda aside for some follow up questions.
Ahead of Stock Market Debut, Agility Cofounder Discusses Physical AI and Digit V5
“Look,” Jonathan Hurst gestures toward the stage below. 1X CEO, Bernt Børnich, is up. Behind him a massive screen is splashed with the phrase, “the holy grail of robotics.” The grail in question is an image of 1X’s tendon drive system. Hurst gestures at the screen. Tendon drives have been a longtime interest for the Agility founder. If you want to write a research paper on the topic, you’ll likely find yourself citing something the Chief Robot Officer has written over the years.
FieldAI is Building Embodied Intelligence For the World's Harshest Terrains
Ali Agha started with the hardest problems first. There’s the Mars helicopter and the search for extraterrestrial life, for starters. The researcher turned FieldAI founder says planetary caves are a prime spot to looking for the latter, as the structures shield any potential life from harmful cosmic rays.
Meet Mbodi, Automate’s 2026 Startup Challenge winner
Several startups are racing to build massive models to learn adapt to new tasks. Xavier Chi, co-founder at Mbodi, doesn’t think that strategy will actually work. “The physical world [offers] unlimited possibility, it's a big challenge to really scale that into a solution that works reliably,” Chi told A3 on a recent episode of Automate Live.
Apptronik Opens 90,000 sq ft Testing Site for New Apollo 2 Humanoid
In February, Apptronik announced a $520 million Series A extension, bringing the full round to nearly $1 billion. The massive funding news arrived just as the humanoid maker had leased around 60,000 square feet of additional space across the street from its Austin, Texas headquarters.
Agility Takes on AI Generalization and Humanoid Safety as it Looks to Go Public
The road to generalization is paved with smaller, simpler tasks. The current generation of humanoid robots, prized for their flexibility, will make their way into factories and warehouses one job at a time. Tote moving is likely the example you’ve most often seen touted — transferring bins from one location to the other. Is it something most humans can do? Sure. Is it something most humans want to be spending their precious time on Earth doing? Probably not so much.
Sony WF-1000XM5 earbuds review
I have two stock answers whenever someone asks me which earbuds to buy. The first answers the question with another question: Who made your phone? Like flagship smartphones, fully wireless earbuds are pretty good across the board — and the category managed to get there in record time. Headphones often operate best with other devices from the same manufacturing, due to feature sets and first-party silicon. The second answer is, simply: Sony.
Robotics Investors are Focused on Return
Here in robotics, there are, thankfully, institutes and organizations whose work isn’t wholly driven by the profit motive. These are places where a simple technological breakthrough is reward enough, and where studies entail more than just customer demographics. These bodies have played an outsized role in advancing the state of the art. These are circles where phrases like “ROI” and “go-to-market” are better avoided in mixed company.
From Moonshots to Ship Docks
“What’s worse than a moonshot?” Nicolaus Radford rhetorically posits. “It was much more, it was much worse than that.” NASA’s Robonaut program turned 30 this year. Officially kicking off in 1996, engineering work began in earnest on the humanoid astronaut the following year. By the turn of the millennium, the team had produced the first version of the robot torso. A more “portable” Robonaut R1B arrived in 2002. None managed to slip the surly bonds of Earth.
How Anki and Waymo Built a Foundation for Bedrock Robotics
There’s an alternate version of Boris Sofman’s career that plays out differently. In this timeline, the CMU robotics PhD gets more heavily involved in the day’s DARPA challenge and — like many of his classmates — finds himself immersed in the early days of self-driving startups immediately out of school. Most timelines lead there eventually.
Genesis AI goes minimalist humanoid with Eno
July 1 marks a year since Genesis AI emerged from stealth with $105 million in seed funding. Examining the size and volume of massive physical AI funding rounds that have emerged in the intervening months, it’s easy to lose sight of how massive that amount is — particularly when dealing with the seed stage.
Brightpick's Journey From Imaging Spinoff to Automation Powerhouse
As humans go, Jan Zizka’s SEO sucks. In Slovakian terms, it’s like going through life named George Washington, Napoleon Bonaparte, or Alexander the Great (the latter, admittedly, probably qualifies as more of a nickname). “My grandfather and my father had the same name, so I would say it was kind of [an] obvious choice,” Brightpick’s CEO says with a laugh. He adds that sharing a name with a legendary Czech military leader has its perks in certain corners of the world.
Formlabs Blurs the Line Between Prototype and Production with Fuse X1 SLS Printer
Formlabs is a perennial outlier. The MIT spinout launched amid the desktop 3D printing boom, delivering a stereolithography (SLA) system that vastly outperformed the FDM devices dominating the market. When the bubble burst a few years later, the Sommerville, Massachusetts startup was among the few that not only survived — but thrived. More than a decade later, one can’t visit an R&D facility without encountering one of Formlabs’ orange tinted systems.
Texas Instruments' CTO on Making Hardware in the Age of AI
In publishing, it’s known as “killing your darlings.” It’s been alternately ascribed to the usual suspects for quotations of uncertain origin — Faulkner, Wilde, Chekov, Eudora Welty. It’s universal advice about avoiding myopia that applies across disciplines.
Andromeda Prepares to Scale Age Tech Robot, Abi
The last time we spoke, Grace Brown was exhausted. You wouldn’t know it from the clips. Managing a 12- hour time difference and running off fumes from a fresh $23 million AUD ($16M USD) raise, Andromeda’s founder brought her A game to one of the Automated podcast’s inaugural episodes. “I just remember being so exhausted,” she admits with a laugh.
Why Locus Bought Nexera to Make a Better End Effector
A year before Array made its debut on the floor at Modex, viewing the robot was an invite-only affair. “Back in 2025, Array was a prototype,” says Rick Faulk, “a good prototype, but we knew we had to enhance that. Frankly, the question we got over and over and over as we did demos behind the wall at that show was, ‘will it pick my thing?’ That was the first question that we got.
Letters to Pleo: Kate Darling on Reframing Robotics Opinions
“My opinion is that there's too many opinions about robots out there,” Kate Darling notes. Such a sentiment can go either way, really, roughly one-third of the way into an hour-long podcast interview that is, for all intents and purposes, about robots. There are, objectively, a lot of opinions about robots out there. I suspect I encounter more than most as part of my day-to-day operations.
Genesis AI's Novel Approach to Robot Training
Vivian Sun has been around the block in autonomous driving. There were stints at trucking companies TuSimple and Waabi, where she respectively served as VP of business and chief commercial officer, followed by a stint as Amazon’s head of autonomous driving. In March, Sun pivoted to a new — though related — field, joining Genesis AI. The move was a gamble of sorts. While still not fully mature, we’re more than a decade into the world of big self-driving bets.
A Golden Compass: OSU Dean Ayanna Howard on Recentering Robotics' Human Focus
If you’ve ever considered writing a book about technology, you’ve grappled with the fact that the publishing industry doesn’t keep pace with the tech world. It’s taken as read that certain aspects will no longer be wholly accurate by the time its release date rolls around. Of course, good technologists accurately interpret the writing on the wall long before those changes occur.
Social Studies: How Design Impacts Human-Robot Interaction
I start by congratulating Kayla Matheus on her new job — I’m fairly certain listed on her LinkedIn profile when we’d first discussed setting up an interview. She thanks me, adding, with a bit of a laugh, “I did the slightly masochistic thing of defending my PhD, immediately going to a conference and then coming back and moving across the country and starting a job the next day. But when there's a really interesting opportunity, you have to seize it.
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