Plus Newton’s 1st Law vs 2nd and other insights from the leading edge of robotics deployments.
As companies grow, that wonderful initial company culture and mission statement like Google’s famous ‘don’t be evil’ start to quietly disappear. First from the website, then the business, and eventually even employees stop believing. Mind you even back in the 2000s, Google was being a bit evil, ie. scooping up unencrypted wifi data from homes and businesses around the world with their Streetview cars. However, for a long time they’ve coasted on counter-positioning against companies like Palantir, Anduril or Flock. They are also large enough to survive employee protests.
Boston Dynamics is selling four robot dogs to ICE for $1.3 million, a contract which has sparked strong employee backlash with 20% of employees endorsing a petition protesting the sale. Boston Dynamics CEO Amanda McMaster is standing by the sale, stating that all customers must comply with the company’s terms and conditions for sale, which “prohibit any attempts to weaponize our robot or use it for purposes of harm or intimidation.”
Robots should be used to help, not harm. We prohibit weaponization, while supporting the safe, ethical, and effective use of robots in public safety.
Boston Dynamics has long held a strong position about the use of their robots as weapons. They’ve put themselves behind proposed legislations to ban the weaponsization of robots and explicitly prohibit weaponization in their commercial contracts. This is in spite of having contracts with government and armed forces.
For more information read this article ICE wants robot dogs. Boston Dynamics’ workers urge company to ‘cancel the sale’ in WBUR by Zeninjor Enwemeka and Simón Rios.
As robots reach into more and more areas of society, the likelihood of robots becoming public scapegoats increases significantly. How should this be handled?
Bots, Bevs and Women in Robotics
Great talks from Allison Thackston from Blue River, Erin McColl from TRI and Kathryn Zealand from Skip, who were then joined by Laura Stelzner from Trener Robotics and Shermie Miller-Zhang from Circuit Launch for a Q&A session.
The speakers had widely different views on whether or not humanoids were a useful form factor and about what constituted a good hand or gripper. On one end of the spectrum, Kat Zealand believes that anything more than 2 and 1/2 fingers is over-engineering, while Allison Thackston said that whatever sort of hand it is, the main issue is the lack of sensors, and Erin McColl says that the best hand could be a flat surface, or 20 tentacles and that we should be exceeding human hand specs.
Kat Zealand says, that “Companies need to focus on the problem and the best solution for that problem. Many humanoid companies are incredibly complicated and overbuilt hammers looking for a nail. Any of the potential large market segments and use cases could likely be served by something simpler and lower-cost at scale.”
Shermie Zhang added that “We’re still seeing founders under a lot of pressure to work with the latest technologies, and they lose track of the core capabilities that would give them a good product-market fit and a product that is manufacturable and scalable. Sometimes, by chasing the latest technology, they end up building something that is inherently difficult to build and scale.”
Regarding building for scale, Kat said, “You can buy cheap robots that break very quickly. We’ve invested more than a year to get our reliability up enough to offer a warranty to users… but this comes with the cost associated with a premium product.”
While Kat focuses on scaling reliability, Shermie considers scaling manufacturability. “Hardware companies already struggle with deployment. Hardware that is driven by specific features can lock founders into architectures that aren’t compatible with manufacturing, and often they don’t discover those limitations until much later in their journey.”
Advances in AI are being incredibly useful for developing on device capabilities. According to Kat Zealalnd, “We use deep learning for all of our controls – it allows us to use tiny on-device models to predict human movement and provide comfortable assistance across all of the messy and unstructured movements that humans do. Initially we had concerns about safety and explainablity, but ML-driven controls are actually safer since they don’t require us to manually code-in every edge case.”
Shermie also considered the increasing need for a robotics skilled workforce. “We’ve become very interested in the time gap between when a new technological advancement is introduced to the market and when operators are hired for it. That gap signals to us when a technology has actually been adopted and is being deployed. We’d like to see more programs focused on accelerating workforce development to help companies grow and scale. Schools aren’t built to react quickly enough for students to graduate with the skill sets the workforce needs.”
Bonus thought! 1 in 5 adults in the US have problems with movement, and if we can keep people active, out of nursing homes and reduce falls that creates enormous economic value – far more than most of the markets suitable for humanoids… but it is also a much more complex controls problems; we need to make robots that can dance with humans not just replace them. Working cooperatively with squishy variable humans is hard but has huge upside. Kat Zealand, Skip: Move More With Move Wear
Encord’s Long Horizon
This conference delivered much more than great speakers and panels. It was THE place to run into everyone in robotics that you wanted to talk to. I missed half the sessions I’d planned to attend because the conversations were so much more valuable.
One fundamental takeaway from the event came from Rodney Brooks, CTO and Founder of Robust AI. According to Brooks, robots, particularly humanoid robots, have been succeeding so far due to Newton’s 1st Law, but Newton’s 2nd Law is already slowing progress right down. It’s comparatively easy to perform acrobatic feats of locomotion when you are only working against gravity. Once you start trying to manipulate objects in the real world the number of forces you are interacting with multiply exponentially.
That’s a short spoiler from an interview I did there with Rodney Brooks for the IEEE Robotics and Automation Magazine (March 2027 issue).
SVR Robotics Evening with Intel
Great evening with a capacity audience for this workshop and demo night learning about Intel’s robotics stack, Intel Fellow Kevin Cloutier and some of Intel’s top AI and robotics scientists. Many of the attendees deploying their own robot systems were very interested in the Pantherlake Core architecture which integrates CPU, GPU, and NPU architecture on a single chip, delivering up to 180–200 TOPS of AI performance for edge-based robotics and humanoid systems.
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FUSE is the location technology conference for Physical AI – Nov 19
As Physical AI moves from prototypes to deployment at scale, reliable localization has emerged as a foundational layer. Designs that worked in the lab break down when exposed to real-world conditions.
Join leading robotics engineers in San Francisco to discuss the system design patterns they’ve used to successfully ship at scale. One day, one track, no product keynotes.
Learn more at fuse.pointonenav.com/sf Use SVR30% discount code
Robot Hackathon – Oct 29
Viam and MongoDB are excited to host a two-day, hands-on hackathon for curious, ambitious builders who want to go deep on physical AI. You’ll get a real robot arm and support from Viam experts throughout.
No prior robotics experience is required, just an interest in physical AI and some software experience.
Space is limited! Apply through this page. Applicants will be accepted on a rolling basis.
Prizes
We’ll award prizes to a total of three teams. Each member of a winning team will take home SO-101 pre-assembled robot kits, including: a leader arm, a follower arm, and a camera + Viam credits.
- Gold: SO-101 arm + $5,000 in MongoDB Atlas credits and $5,000 in Viam credits
- Silver: SO-101 arm + $2,500 in MongoDB Atlas credits and $2,500 in Viam credits
- Bronze: SO-101 arm + $1,000 in MongoDB Atlas credits and $1,000 in Viam credits
Nominate for IEEE RAS Awards – Nov 15
Via IEEE Robotics and Automation Society Industry Activities Board
Here’s a lot more detail on the three awards:
- IEEE Robotics and Automation Award for Product Innovation
- This award is given to companies, and has a strong list of previous winners (e.g., iRobot, Aldebaran Robotics, Clearpath Robotics, Fetch Robotics, ANYbotics, and Sarcos Robotics (twice)), but we’ve not had a lot of good applicants/nominations recently.
- We’re going to award (up to) 3 finalists, and RAS/IAB will fund them to come to ICRA 2027 in Seoul
- IEEE Inaba Technical Award for Innovation Leading to Production
- This one focuses on technical innovation leading to a commercialized product. It hasn’t been awarded in several years, due to lack of nominations
- Previous winners include Roland Siegwart, Ken Salisbury, Rodney Brooks, and Masahiro Fujita
- Think of technology & innovation leading to a great product! A great place to recognize folks that may have been in academia and then transferred it to production
- Early Government or Industry Career Award in Robotics and Automation
- Criteria is < 7 years since most advanced academic degree, and focus is on impact in government or industry
- Some previous winners include Nicola Tomatis, Rainer Bischoff, Ayanna Howard, Paolo Pirjanian, and Torsten Kroeger
Silicon Valley Robotics Investor/Startup Database
Every month or two we share updated startup information with accredited investors. These investors write checks anywhere from angel and seed stage to $5-50 million.
- Feedback from the startups – high quality inbound interest from investors.
- Feedback from the investors – incredible depth and range of robotics startups.
Are you a startup fundraising atm? Fill out our “For Investors Eyes Only” sheet.
If you’re an accredited investor and haven’t already signed up for the spreadsheet – Sign up here for great robotics deal flow!
SVR Startup Pitch Showcase – Nov 12
We are looking for 8 early stage robotics startups (raised less than $5 million to date) to present your five minute pitches in front of a panel of investors on Nov 12 at the Korea/SV Physical AI Day at Plug’n’Play.
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Stanford researchers open autonomous robotics learning to the world
Principles of Robot Autonomy (PoRA) is a new textbook by Daniele Gammelli, Joseph Lorenzetti, Katie Luo, Gioele Zardini and Marco Pavone, inspired by a course series, which has been taught at Stanford since 2017.
What started as a graduate-level course provided the foundation for a dedicated undergraduate course, short summer programs for college students from outside Stanford, and a specialized course for the U.S. Air Force Test Pilot School.
Through the combination of text, lecture videos, code, homework assignments, presentations, and interactive virtual instruction, the authors hope they have made this education as accessible as possible.
“We made this book for developers who have already been working in robotics for years who want to learn more about the state-of-the-art in autonomy and for people who are just starting in AI who are excited about applying it to physical systems,” said Pavone. “Like the course, the book is made to be accessible by a very wide audience.”
Ready-to-use robotics building blocks from Intrinsic are now open source
Intrinsic recently introduced Intrinsic Core to make it easy and fast to build, test, and iterate on robotics development, from prototype to production. Free to all, ready-to-use, and ROS-compatible, these open source foundational capabilities from the Intrinsic platform include a hardware-agnostic, real-time control framework, pose estimation, motion planning, and simulation powered by Gazebo.
Get Intrinsic Core on GitHub now: https://github.com/intrinsic-ai/intrinsic-core
Join the Intrinsic Developer Community: https://developer.intrinsic.ai
Robotics News
Tesla targets shipping Optimus to customers by the end of 2027 – Business Insider
Tesla is competing in a crowded humanoid market. Agility Robotics, which plans to go public, has deployed its Digit robot across nine customer facilities, while Figure AI has announced deployments in logistics and distribution centers this year. Sunday Robotics, 1X, and Weave Robotics are preparing to ship robots into homes this fall.
The Robot I Didn’t Expect to Build by Jonathan Hurst- IEEE Spectrum
China’s humanoids go job hunting amid Korea’s bets on physical AI – The Korea Times
Formic Raises $50 Million to Scale Physical AI Across American Manufacturing – Business Wire
Inside the ‘gym’ where robots learn to iron, fix cars and milk cows – The Times UK
Agile ONE SN Humanoid Robot Bundles Nvidia’s Robotics Stack, Launches Soon – TechRepublic
Meet Mori, a Cute Robot Mushroom that Doesn’t Really Say (or Do) Anything – Wired
The $20,000 Voxel bot will help you find misplaced things around your home – The Verge
Eka Robotics raises $150M to scale its vision-force-action model for robots – The Robot Report
Walden Robotics Partners With Toyota on Practical Humanoids – IEEE Spectrum
How NVIDIA, Teradyne and Sereact Are Scaling Physical AI – AI Magazine
Dream Labs raises $90M and launches Dream API – The Robot Report
Rivian Buys Synthetic Data Statup To Boost Its Autonomy Ambitions – InsideEVs
Robots are coming to Washington’s apple orchards – Axios
Robotics companies connect with growers as new Yakima Valley incubator announced – Yakima Herald
Seattle ag-tech startup Carbon Robotics reduces workforce, citing economic conditions – GeekWire
Kubota to Launch Autonomous M5L Orchard Tractor in 2027 – Successful Farming
Einride’s autonomous trucks to learn from Nvidia’s Alpamayo – Freightwaves
Lasers, Robots and AI: the Fight to Save Salmon Goes High-Tech – WSJ
Feds want robotaxis to signal “I’m driving’ with cyan-colored lights – The Verge
NHSTA proposes cyan lights for robotaxis, following Mercedes China – Electrek
Bolt, Stellantis plan autonomous driving experiment in Greater Paris from 2028 – Reuters
Waymo to launch autonomous ride-hailing in Madrid next year – Reuters
Volkswagen pitches autonomous ID.Buzz as open platform – Automotive World
Hottest toy for christmas? nvidia CEO plays with adorable Microduck robots, 20,000 sell – TechCrunch
Robotics Events
Join the Evergreen Tech-a-Trons for RoboFest 2026!
San Jose’s award-winning student robotics team, FTC Team #25690, invites you to a completely free community STEM festival on Saturday, November 14th, from 4:00–8:00 PM at the Village Square Outdoor Plaza.
Come experience the excitement of engineering with hands-on robot driving, live matches, 3D printing showcases, local food trucks, and interactive games for all ages. Supported by Councilmember Domingo Candelas, this family-friendly event is designed to inspire local youth.
Come grab a bite, drive a robot, and celebrate community innovation! Learn more at https://evergreentechatron.wixsite.com/home
Want to host an event or reach the robotics community?
Many companies are reaching out to Silicon Valley Robotics about hosting events, outreach or hiring and we have a great community network, of people looking for work, of investors interested in deal flow and of technologists interested in learning about the latest advances.
Would you be interested in hosting the next Bots, Bevs and Devs? Or something customized specifically for your goals? Reach out here!
Upcoming Events:
Voxel51 Physical AI Workshop and Meetup – Menlo Park – Oct 27
Voxel51 Physical AI Workshop and Meetup – SF – Oct 28
Viam Robot Hackathon – Mountain View – Oct 29
Bay Area Robotics Symposium – Berkeley – Oct 30
Humanoids 2026 competition participation – SCCC – deadline Oct 31
SVR Startup Pitch Showcase (Apply) at Physical AI Conference (Attend) – Nov 12
SRI celebrates two new IEEE milestones – Computer History Museum – Nov 13
FUSE – San Francisco – Nov 19 (use SVR30% discount code or look for special offer in your SVR member email)
Bots, Bevs & Devs – tbd – Dec 2
IEEE Humanoids 2026 – SCCC – Dec 6-9
* including SVR Venture and Manufacturing Summits – Dec 7
Highlights from IEEE Humanoids 2026:
- Registration now open – Early Bird closes on October 20th
- Rong Xiong and Moritz Bächer join keynote speakers, RJ Scaringe and Jerry Pratt
- 63% increase in paper submissions
- 12 Accepted Workshops and Tutorials, plus 3 Special Summits
- NIST Humanoids 2026 Loco-Manipulation Challenge – expressions of interest are open now – deadline Oct 31. Testbed humanoids are available thanks to Partners Ultimate Bots.
Join the organizing team at Silicon Valley Robotics – bots&beer@svrobo.org
If you enjoy Robots & Startups please restack. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
