Many roboticists (and at least one robotics journalist) have been seduced by the dream of a robot butler. And the rampant popularity of videos showing humanoid robots doing household tasks in improbably clean kitchens and unrealistically tidy bedrooms suggests that we’re not the only ones interested in a robot that can do our chores. But for all kinds of reasons, legged humanoids are not yet ready for industrial or commercial applications at scale, and home applications (if people even want them), I would argue, are even farther away. Even so, ludicrously well-funded humanoid robotics companies are now ramping production while explicitly promising that their robots will be doing ‘housework.’
So what about that robot butler dream, then? It still exists! All you have to do is forget about legs, arms, hands, faces, and focus on what really matters: mobility and manipulation. This is what Hello Robot’sStretch robot is unapologetically all about, and the newest version being announced today, Stretch 4, is closer than ever to a robot that could safely do practical work in the home at an accessible cost.
Hello Robot says Stretch 4 is “built for the real world.”Hello Robot
“With Stretch 4, we wanted to make the transition from a research platform to something that is truly deployable,” explains Aaron Edsinger, Hello Robot co-founder and CEO. This version, while ready for research and enterprise customers now, is designed for pilot deployments to help Hello Robot understand how to scale in the home. “This has been our most difficult design process,” adds co-founder and CTO Charlie Kemp. “We had a lot of fear of ‘second-system syndrome,’ where you add all the features you didn’t get to initially and end up with a monstrosity. But since we founded the company on making simple, minimalist robots, every time we added complexity it was an emotional challenge. Navigating that fear resulted in a nice compromise that sits in a great spot, rather than being a maximalist humanoid.”
Stretch 4 Upgrades
The biggest change from the previous version of Stretch is the addition of an omnidirectional base, meaning that the robot can translate in any direction without having to turn first. This makes it much easier to control (especially for novice users), but omnidirectional bases are significantly more complicated to design and build. What ultimately made it possible for Stretch were new types of omnidirectional wheels developed for powered wheelchairs, along with a solid six months of focused development by Hello Robot.
A redesigned sensorized head gives Stretch more options for teleoperation and autonomy.Hello Robot
Stretch 4 also ditches the cute little pan-tilt head for a more complex sensor suite with a much wider field of view. “We started out wanting to use lots of cheap cameras to keep costs low, like Tesla does,” Edsinger tells us. “But we ended up with an approach closer to Waymo’s: the richer and more reliable your data, the safer and more intelligent the robot can be.” There are a pair of hemispherical lidars, Luxonis cameras for vision and navigation, and a wrist-mounted depth camera for manipulation. The robot’s primary system runs on an Intel NUC 15, plus an Nvidia Jetson Orin NX for researchers to play with for visual processing or AI.
Philosophy on Autonomy
Hello Robot’s general philosophy on autonomy is to have a human in the loop, but that can take many different forms ranging from direct control to purely supervisory control. The robot will ship with a baseline of autonomous capabilities that include mapping, navigation, and self-charging, along with demo-ready features like autonomous grasping. But unlike most other robotics companies, Hello Robot isn’t looking to use their hardware to collect a stupendous amount of data in the concerningly vague hope that commercially viable autonomy will follow.
“Stretch has huge advantages in safety, cost, and capability,” Kemp says. “I’d much rather be the platform that foundation model developers target.” Edsinger agrees: “We do want to partner with foundation model companies to explore things like dexterous in-home manipulation, but we aren’t the ones to build those foundation models.”
In-Home Pilots
While earlier versions of Stretch were primarily for research, Kemp tells us that Stretch 4 has been explicitly designed to be piloted in the homes of people with severe mobility impairments. Hello Robot will be happy to sell you one (or lots, I’m guessing) for commercial or industrial applications, but the broader goal with Stretch 4 is to use remote testing and in-home evaluations to work towards a robot that’s useful and reliable enough that it can provide consistent daily value for disabled users.
A holonomic base and an extendable arm make for a capable robot without the complexity.Hello Robot
Part of why I’m optimistic about Stretch finding near-term success in this role is precisely because it’s not a humanoid. One of the primary arguments for humanoids is that they’re worth pursuing because they can better operate in environments designed for humans, where legs and five-fingered hands are tangible advantages. But those very same environments often exclude an entire subset of humanity—a subset of humanity that we will all likely join at some point, because the best that any of us can ever say is that we are not disabled yet.
Why Not Humanoids?
A key partner for Hello Robot throughout the Stretch development process has been Henry Evans. Evans is paralyzed and cannot speak, although he can use a computer (for controlling robots, among other things) and type at about 15 words per minute. I spoke with Evans about his thoughts on the idea of a humanoid assistive robot, compared to a robot like Stretch. “The question is: What benefit does a bipedal robot offer to a person who can’t walk?” Evans asks. “Their entire environment has been modified to accommodate wheeled conveyances. Automobiles don’t have legs, and neither should home robots. Wheels are cheap, stable, precise, require very few controls, and don’t have to be invented.”
Henry Evans has been testing a Stretch 4 as a home assistive robot.Hello Robot
Evans also points out that humanoids can require the simultaneous control of dozens of degrees of freedom. “A paralyzed person who can’t talk (like yours truly) can control maybe one or two joints at a time with today’s control mechanisms, if they are lucky.” Evans believes that AI, along with Brain Computer Interfaces (BCIs), show promise for dramatically increasing what he can do when it comes to motion. “Remember, though, a paralyzed person has no movements to mimic, so until a perfectly tuned BCI gets here and facilitates a true humanoid body surrogate, I don’t think it will work. And even then, I don’t see the advantage of legs for assistive care robots. I am willing to be proven wrong, though, and will test-drive almost anything once, so bring it on!”
Kemp and Edsinger, who have many decades of humanoid experience between them, feel similarly. “There are applications where the human form is fundamental,” Kemp says. “But for many applications, the value of the human form is unclear or even problematic. Jumping to the conclusion that robots must be humanoid means missing opportunities to take advantage of the structured indoor environments that we’ve already created.”
Georgena Moran and her sisters tested Stretch 4 at the California Academy of Sciences Museum, allowing her to interact with the exhibits from home.Hello Robot
And of course there’s the question of safety, which Evans brings up. “My caregivers and I have been testing robots in my home to assist us for about 15 years, and the very first concerns are: Where is the emergency stop, and how do you activate it? It gets used surprisingly often. The thing is, when a wheeled robot gets emergency stopped, it freezes in place. When a bipedal robot gets run-stopped, it collapses on anything under it, including the patient.” Kemp agrees. “The safety aspect of humanoids in a home freaks me out. I don’t know how someone can confidently think about safety with a humanoid in a home.”
Robots for Sale
However you feel about humanoids, here’s one more reason why Stretch feels like a much more realistic solution for in-home assistive robots right now: You can actually buy one, and at US $29,950, it’s very affordable, as mobile manipulators go. Edsinger and Kemp are planning to leverage in-home Stretch 4 pilot deployments to make the next version of Stretch the one that can be commercially sold for home assistance. At the rate that Hello Robot has been releasing new hardware, that could easily be within the next year or so—and my guess is that Stretch 5 is very likely to be the first practical, affordable assistive robot for home use. It may not look like Rosie, but it promises to be safe, and it works.
Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your friends at IEEE Spectrum robotics. We also post a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months. Please send us your events for inclusion.
Introducing GENE-26.5—the first AI brain to give robots human-level physical manipulation capabilities. Cooking a full meal. Cracking an egg one-handed. Conducting lab experiments. Wire harnessing. Even playing the piano. Tasks that were impossible for robots. Until now.
This is Labububot—one of the rarest monsters on Earth. Twelve Labubu heads are reconstituted into a single spherical form: a Frankenstein’s Monster of pop culture iconography. Labububot is a playful critique of social robots, and a question made physical—what do the monsters we make reveal about the monsters we are?
Watch Spot crouch, jump, climb boxes, and leap across gaps, controlled by a neural network trained with reinforcement learning (RL) and multi-expert distillation.
Additive manufacturing has become an enabling technology, but existing techniques are not capable of directly 3D printing high-current electromagnetic actuators due to material and design limitations. In this work, a novel 3D-printable, multilayer, wave-winding topology is created for high-efficiency electric motors.
NASA is pushing the limits of flight on Mars—by spinning helicopter rotor blades so fast, they’re breaking the sound barrier. During recent tests at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, engineers accelerated the tips of next-generation rotor blades beyond Mach 1 inside a special chamber that simulates the atmospheric conditions of the Red Planet.
Automated inspection of steel structures using magnetic climbing robots can reduce costs and improve safety, but many such structures feature interior corners that are challenging for wheeled or tracked robots to traverse. We present the first magnetic-wheeled robot to use X-ray fluorescence for steel structure inspection, Sally, capable of overcoming all interior corner transition types, traversing small obstacles, and maneuvering in tight spaces.
Jim Fan, who leads the embodied autonomous research group at Nvidia, returns to AI Ascent to argue that robotics is entering its endgame—and that the playbook is already written.
Today, Familiar Machines & Magic is announcing its first robot, a “physically embodied AI system designed to perceive, adapt, and interact with people in ways that feel natural and consistent,” the press release says. This robot is not a toy, and it’s not specifically for kids. Rather, it’s for adults to purchase for themselves and their families. It will get to know you, seek you out for attention, and actively help you positively pursue an idealized routine in your life.
Intended for adults, Familiar is pet-like in that it will seek you out for attention.Familiar Machines & Magic
Here are the (limited) technical details from the press release:
The first Familiar is a quadruped, specifically designed for human-robot interaction, with 23 degrees of freedom enabling both lifelike movement and expressive behaviors. The Familiar is covered with a custom touch-sensitive coat, a vision system, and a microphone array and audio system, to support rich interactions. Its onboard edge AI stack is powered by a custom small multimodal model optimized for social reasoning, combining vision, audio, language, and memory to create socially responsive behaviors in real time.
FM&M CEO and cofounder Colin Angle tells us that this first prototype Familiar is designed to look like a sort of highly abstracted bear. It’s very deliberately nothing like a dog or a cat, following the successful strategy of other social robots like Paro and Pleo—if you can’t connect the form factor to an animal that you have direct experience with, you won’t bring expectations to your interactions with the robot.
What Does it Do?
“Our goal is to position this as a robot familiar that lives with you and helps reinforce healthy routines,” Angle says. He explains that thinking of a Familiar like a pet is a strong analogy, but pet-like also undersells what the robot can do. The Familiar behaves a little more like a service animal, in the narrow sense of being able to recognize activities and intervene to motivate you to do more or less of them, as the case may be. One easy example is screen time—the Familiar can note how much time you spend on your phone, and if it’s too much, it can actively try to engage you in other activities, including taking it for a walk outside. “The idea,” says Angle, “is that you can have a bit of technology in your home which is hyperloyal to you, gets to know you, helps you figure out an idealized routine, and then plays a positive role.”
Spending too much time on your phone? Familiar can help with that.Familiar Machines & Magic
Cramming this amount of intelligence into a robot that you can take for a walk outside (at regular human walking pace) is extremely ambitious. I asked FM&M’s creative director Morgan Pope what made him feel that a robot like a Familiar was possible, with enough confidence that he was willing to leave Disney Research to join the startup. “Two recent advancements made it feel tractable,” Pope says. “First, seeing Disney’s bipedal robots walk flexibly over various terrain using reinforcement learning proved you can execute dynamic motion without needing perfect, zero-backlash actuators or crazy expensive hardware. And second, while I am often skeptical of generative AI hype, it is a perfect fit here because it excels at creating the plausible assumption of intelligence, which helps the character feel coherent and lifelike.”
The Challenge of Social Home Robots
As a social home robot, the Familiar will have quite a lot of work to do to single-pawedly reestablish a category that burned itself out between 2012 and 2019. A series of high-profile and very-well-funded startups including Anki, Mayfield, and Jibo were not able to sustain social home robots as a business, primarily because of a struggle with longer-term engagement. It’s not enough for a robot to be cute and charming in the short term; it has to continue enthralling its users or at least providing value after the initial novelty has worn off. In other words, a flashy demo is arguably counterproductive, which is a real problem, since robots excel at flashy demos.
Part of the value of Familiar is that it will help you establish healthy routines.Familiar Machines & Magic
“It’s about creating the right expectation and delivering on that expectation,” says Angle. “Familiars live in your world and play by your rules, and if you don’t find yourself hanging out with it, petting it, and engaging with it, then we haven’t succeeded.”
In what is very much not a coincidence, the term familiar really is the best way of thinking about this robot—a sort of vaguely magical nonhuman entity that has some amount of independence but whose existence and motivation are fundamentally tied to its human. “This isn’t trying to be a replacement for a real friend,” Angle explains. “It’s artificial life that lives in your world, has its own personality and goals, and has a special link to its guardian where it wants attention and wants its guardian to be active.”
Creating Long-Term Value
This philosophy is a key differentiator for FM&M. A Familiar is more than a companion; it has long-term objectives that it’s trying to fulfill to improve your life in a targeted way, says Angle. It’ll attempt to connect with you socially to encourage you to spend time with it in service of those goals, but the goals are the end, er, goals, rather than just the social connection itself, which was the primary draw of the previous generation of social robots. “Within a few days of bringing your Familiar home,” Angle tells us, “it’s figured out what its role in your life is. It’s trying to reinforce a healthy routine, whether that be summoning people to dinner or cuddling up while you watch TV, or greeting you when you get home. And then the way you sustain that relationship is by having it evolve, with both characters playing an active role—you’re also helping it with the things required to keep a robot operating.”
Human-Familiar Interaction
The temptation to leverage recent advances in AI to make a robot like a Familiar talk, especially in the context of regularly interacting with humans in pursuit of specific goals, must have been overwhelming. But to its credit, FM&M managed to resist. “I don’t believe that the technology exists today for AI to talk to humans in a safe, responsible fashion,” Angle explains. Consequently, a Familiar does not currently speak, although it does make sounds, and has plenty of other ways of communicating. “Through careful design, you’d be amazed what you can powerfully convey using a tail, wiggly ears, blinking eyes, and a brow that can be happy, sad, angry, or annoyed,” Angle says. This will likely resonate strongly with dog owners, somewhat less strongly with cat owners, and only very slightly with reptile owners like me.
Familiar is capable enough to keep up with you on walks outdoors.Familiar Machines & Magic
Going the other direction is more complicated. Those same recent advances in AI mean that a Familiar can very likely understand everything you say and obey you perfectly, if it chose to. But doing so would break the illusion that the robot has its own desires and goals and personality, so FM&M had to be careful. “The way we’ve trained it from an AI perspective is really cool,” Angle explains. “We’re using a tableau of speech and vision inputs presented to a small multimodal model trained on stories, and for a given tableau of inputs, it goes through a generative process to decide at a high level what it is going to do. That decision is handed to a behavior engine which builds out those behavior trees into goals and drives a reinforcement learning unified motion model. There is nothing fully deterministic about your Familiar’s behavior; it truly tries to live its life with a variety of personality-driven emotions.”
Safety at Home
A Familiar is not big, as robots go, but it’s not exactly small, either. And as something with legs, there’s always a concern about what happens if it falls over. “Its low center of gravity helps immensely,” says Pope. “If we pull power, it collapses downward safely rather than tipping over. Furthermore, it is wrapped in soft rubber, fur, and padding, so even if a leg impacts you, it won’t have a lot of force behind it.” Interestingly, FM&M is also leveraging the “character experience” to mitigate risks to both robot and user. “We can use emotions to communicate hazards effectively,” explains Pope. “For example, if someone carries it somewhere high or puts it near an open flame, the Familiar can act visibly scared to directly communicate that it doesn’t like the situation.”
While not a toy or specifically intended for children, Familiar can provide gentle, warm attention to your family.Familiar Machines & Magic
Besides physical safety, social robots must also consider emotional safety. The better job you do emotionally connecting with people, the more responsibility you have to make sure that those connections are positive. “We take this very seriously,” Pope tells us. “We must follow a ‘do no harm’ philosophy, ensuring we don’t trigger unhealthy dependency or monopolize people’s attention the way a phone does. We are designing carefully to ensure the overall impact remains positive and never crosses the line into harm.” Additionally, the Familiar’s AI runs onboard the robot, and the robot does not stream private data to the cloud. It will, in fact, run just fine if you disconnect it from the internet entirely, although you’ll lose access to any new features that come out.
Managing Expectations
Alongside the many engineering and human-robot interaction (HRI) challenges that FM&M is having to manage is one other challenge that, in the near term, sounds rather dull but may be the most challenging: marketing. The company obviously has to promote this robot, but there’s a real danger (which has had dire consequences for many robotics companies in the past) of selling an idea of what the robot could be rather than the reality of what the robot actually is.
From my conversations with Pope, FM&M seems to understand that robots have always been the most successful when the experience or task is incidental to the robot itself—in other words, what’s most compelling is what the robot will do, rather than the fact that it’s a robot. “The best way to understand a Familiar is that we are not building a robot; we are building a relationship,” Pope explains.
Whether in the context of locomotion or relationships, we can be absolutely certain that a robot of this level of sophistication is not going to do what it’s supposed to every single time. Fortunately, the folks at FM&M have been building robots for long enough that they’re prepared for this. “We’ve explicitly tried to design it to motivate forgiveness,” Angle tells us. “This is not a precise robotic entity in its motion or dexterity. It’s supposed to be imperfect, but it’s going to get some of it right. By actively working to manage expectations to a place we can achieve, we want consumers to appreciate what it can do.”
What customers expect, what they appreciate, and how much forgiveness they’re willing to bestow is for better or worse highly dependent on how much a Familiar will cost. “For the cost of ownership of something like a pet, you’re getting something that can help you live a healthier life, feel attended to, and provide social benefit,” Angle says. This could mean many things, depending on the pet, but one source puts the low end of the monthly cost for a cat at around $65 per month, with a dog somewhat more expensive at closer to $100 per month. FM&M’s press release stresses that today’s announcement ‘is not a commercial product launch,’ and specific pricing and a timeline will come later.
A Future Platform
While it’s much too early for us to be speculating about what the future might hold for FM&M’s robots, Angle is of course already thinking about other places where Familiars might be at home. “This first robot is meant to be a platform with general appeal and an opportunity to specialize into things like elder care and parental support,” Angle says. “From the ground up we are designing machines focused on human connection, and the underlying technology can further generalize into other form factors.”
This will require the Familiar to find success, and it’s important to reiterate how much of a challenge this will be. A legged robot, designed for human interaction, in the home—everything about what FM&M is doing is hard. Because of his experience launching and leading iRobot, Angle is one of the very few people with the experience to really understand this, but his excitement and optimism about the Familiar is undiminished. “Do we know exactly how it’s going to land? I don’t,” says Angle. “But do I think it’s going to work? Absolutely. We’re going to find out, with a mission and goals that are noble at heart.”
This article appears in the July 2026 print issue as “Robotic Familiar Helps You Live Your Best Life.”
Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your friends at IEEE Spectrum robotics. We also post a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months. Please send us your events for inclusion.
Figure is now able to produce 55 robots per week, which will be “allocated to internal research and development groups, data collection, efforts for robots to perform end-to-end housework, and commercial use-case development.” Er, that seems like a lot of robots to be making when commercial use cases are still “in development,” doesn’t it?
The opening of the NEO Factory in Hayward, Calif., marks a fundamental shift in humanoid robotics: The United States’ most vertically integrated robot factory has now begun full-scale production, bringing end-to-end manufacturing of NEO under one roof. Spanning 58,000 square feet and employing over 200 team members, 1X designs and builds every critical component in-house—motors, batteries, transmissions, sensors, structures, and final assembly—enabling faster iteration, superior safety, and true American scale. With the first robots already coming off the line and consumer shipments planned for 2026, this is the critical milestone that turns the vision of abundant, general-purpose home robots into reality.
Unlike statically stable robots, a dynamically balanced robot can shift its center of mass to accommodate loads without tipping over, so we like to see just how far we can push our software. Getting Digit to stand on one leg pushes the limits of our sim-to-real pipeline training methodologies—even the slightest model mismatches can lead to instability.
In this work, we develop a tactile-enabled whole-body humanoid manipulation system for stable, dexterous, contact-rich real-world manipulation. Our system combines VR-based whole-body teleoperation, a lower-body controller based on reinforced learning, dexterous hand retargeting, distributed tactile sensing, and a multimodal policy called Humanoid Transformer with Touch Dreaming (HTD).
Originally posted two years ago, “Can I Have a Pet T. Rex?” is a short interdisciplinary portrait documentary. It features paleontologist and Kod*lab postdoc Aja Mia Carter and the Kod*lab robotics researchers Wei-Hsi Chen (also a postdoc) and J. Diego Caporale, a Ph.D. student.
If you’re wondering where all those reported humanoid robot sales are coming from, it’s because every big company needs one or two for this sort of thing.
NASA has two rovers on Mars, but they’re exploring entirely different eras of the planet’s past. Separated by 2,300 miles, the two rovers are uncovering clues from very different moments in Martian history. Perseverance is on the rim of Jezero Crater, where it’s studying some of the oldest Martian terrain ever explored while searching for signs of ancient microbial life. Meanwhile, Curiosity is climbing Mount Sharp inside Gale Crater, where layers of rock reveal how Mars’s climate changed as water dried up from its surface.
The Chinese-made Unitree G1 humanoid robots are making their way into the United States. And they aren’t just in viral videos but in major tech companies like OpenAI and Nvidia, and top academic institutions. Most arrive through Robostore, a robotics reseller based on Long Island. I went there to watch them come off the pallet, then brought one to my home to see what it could actually do. Are these the future of home robots? A security risk? A Chinese surveillance system on legs? I got answers—and a broken toe.
How do autonomous robots make decisions when the world is unpredictable? From self-driving cars to drone swarms, autonomous systems must operate under uncertainty—making real-time decisions with incomplete or unreliable data. In this video, Harvard SEAS Prof. Stephanie Gil explains how AI-powered robots coordinate, adapt, and stay safe in complex, real-world environments.
This April, Hong Kong-based DAIMON Robotics has released Daimon-Infinity, which it describes as the largest omni-modal robotic dataset for physical AI, featuring high resolution tactile sensing and spanning a wide range of tasks from folding laundry at home to manufacturing on factory assembly lines. The project is supported by collaborative efforts of partners across China and the globe, including Google DeepMind, Northwestern University, and the National University of Singapore.
The move signals a key strategic initiative for DAIMON, a two-and-a-half-year-old company known for its advanced tactile sensor hardware, most notably a monochromatic, vision-based tactile sensor that packs over 110,000 effective sensing units into a fingertip-sized module. Drawing on its high-resolution tactile sensing technology and a distributed out-of-lab collection network capable of generating millions of hours of data annually, DAIMON is building large-scale robot manipulation datasets that include vast amounts of tactile sensing data. To accelerate the real-world deployment of embodied AI, the company has also open-sourced 10,000 hours of its data.
Prof. Michael Yu Wang, co-founder and chief scientist at DAIMON Robotics, has pioneered Vision-Tactile-Language-Action (VTLA) architecture, elevating the tactile to a modality on par with vision.DAIMON Robotics
Behind the strategy is Prof. Michael Yu Wang, DAIMON’s co-founder and chief scientist. Prof. Wang earned his PhD at Carnegie Mellon — studying manipulation under Matt Mason — and went on to found the Robotics Institute at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. An IEEE Fellow and former Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering, he has spent roughly four decades in the field. His objective is to address the missing “insensitivity” of robot manipulation, which practically relies on the dominant Vision-Language-Action (VLA) model. He and his team have pioneered Vision-Tactile-Language-Action (VTLA) architecture, elevating the tactile to a modality on par with vision.
We spoke with Prof. Wang about how tactile feedback aims to change dexterous manipulation, how the dataset initiative is foreseen to improve our understanding of robotic hands in natural environments, and where — from hotels to convenience stores in China — he sees touch-enabled robots making their first real-world inroads.
Daimon-Infinity is the world’s largest omni-modal dataset for Physical AI, featuring million-hour scale multimodal data, ultra-high-res tactile feedback, data from 80+ real scenarios and 2,000+ human skills, and more.DAIMON Robotics
The Dataset Initiative
This month, DAIMON Robotics released the largest and most comprehensive robotic manipulation dataset with multiple leading academic institutions and enterprises. Why releasing the dataset now, rather than continuing to focus on product development? What impact will this have on the embodied intelligence industry?
DAIMON Robotics has been around for almost two and a half years. We have been committed to developing high-resolution, multimodal tactile sensing devices to perceive the interaction between a robot’s hand (particularly its fingertips) and objects. Our devices have become quite robust. They are now accepted and used by a large segment of users, including academic and research institutes as well as leading humanoid robotics companies.
As embodied AI continues to advance, the critical role of data has been clearer. Data scarcity remains a primary bottleneck in robot learning, particularly the lack of physical interaction data, which is essential for robots to operate effectively in the real world. Consequently, data quality, reliability, and cost have become major concerns in both research and commercial development.
This is exactly where DAIMON excels. Our vision-based tactile technology captures high-quality, multimodal tactile data. Beyond basic contact forces, it records deformation, slip and friction, material properties and surface textures — enabling a comprehensive reconstruction of physical interactions. Building on our expertise in multimodal fusion, we have developed a robust data processing pipeline that seamlessly integrates tactile feedback with vision, motion trajectories, and natural language, transforming raw inputs into training-ready dataset for machine learning models.
Recognizing the industry-wide data gap, we view large-scale data collection not only as our unique competitive advantage, but as a responsibility to the broader community.
By building and open-sourcing the dataset, we aim to provide the high-quality “fuel” needed to power embodied AI, ultimately accelerating the real-world deployment of general-purpose robotic foundation models.
The robotics industry is highly competitive, and many teams have chosen to focus on data. DAIMON is releasing a large and highly comprehensive cross-embodiment, vision-based tactile multimodal robotic manipulation dataset. How were you able to achieve this?
We have a dedicated in-house team focused on expanding our capabilities, including building hardware devices and developing our own large-scale model. Although we are a relatively small company, our core tactile sensing technology and innovative data collection paradigm enable us to build large-scale dataset.
Our approach is to broaden our offering. We have built the world’s largest distributed out-of-lab data collection network. Rather than relying on centralized data factories, this lightweight and scalable system allows data to be gathered across diverse real-world environments, enabling us to generate millions of hours of data per year.
“To drive the advancement of the entire embodied AI field, we have open-sourced 10,000 hours of the dataset for the broader community.” —Prof. Michael Yu Wang, DAIMON Robotics
This dataset is being jointly developed with several institutions worldwide. What roles did they play in its development, and how will the dataset benefit their research and products?
Besides China based teams, our partners include leading research groups from universities, such as Northwestern University and the National University of Singapore, as well as top global enterprises like Google DeepMind and China Mobile. Their decision to partner with DAIMON is a strong testament to the value of our tactile-rich dataset.
Among the companies involved there are some that have already built their own models but are now incorporating tactile information. By deploying our data collection devices across research, manufacturing and other real-world scenarios, they help us to gather highly practical, application-driven data. In turn, our partners leverage the data to train models tailored to their specific use cases. Furthermore, to drive the advancement of the entire embodied AI field, we have open-sourced 10,000 hours of the dataset for the broader community.
Equipped with Daimon’s visuotactile sensor, the gripper delicately senses contact and precisely controls force to pick up a fragile eggshell.Daimon Robotics
From VLA to VTLA: Why Tactile Sensing Changes the Equation
The mainstream paradigm in robotics is currently the Vision-Language-Action (VLA) model, but your team has proposed a Vision-Tactile-Language-Action (VTLA) model. Why is it necessary to incorporate tactile sensing? What does it enable robots to achieve, and which tasks are likely to fail without tactile feedback?
Over these years of working to make generalist robots capable of performing manipulation tasks, especially dexterous manipulation — not just power grasping or holding an object, but manipulating objects and using tools to impart forces and motion onto parts — we see these robots being used in household as well as industrial assembly settings.
It is well established that tactile information is essential for providing feedback about contact states so that robots can guide their hands and fingers to perform reliable manipulation. Without tactile sensing, robots are severely limited. They struggle to locate objects in dark environments, and without slip detection, they can easily drop fragile items like glass. Furthermore, the inability to precisely control force often leads to failed manipulation tasks or, in severe cases, physical damage. Naturally, the VLA approach needs to be enhanced to incorporate tactile information. We expanded the VLA framework to incorporate tactile data, creating the VTLA model.
An additional benefit of our tactile sensor is that it is vision-based: We capture visual images of the deformation on the fingertip surface. We capture multiple images in a time sequence that encodes contact information, from which we can infer forces and other contact states. This aligns well with the visual framework that VLA is based upon. Having tactile information in a visual image format makes it naturally suitable for integration into the VLA framework, transforming it into a VTLA system. That is the key advantage: Vision-based tactile sensors provide very high resolution at the pixel level, and this data can be incorporated into the framework, whether it is an end-to-end model or another type of architecture.
DAIMON has been known for its vision-based tactile sensors that can pack over 110,000 effective sensing units.DAIMON Robotics
The Technology: Monochromatic Vision-based Tactile Sensing
You and your team have spent many years deeply engaged in vision-based tactile sensing and have developed the world’s first monochromatic vision-based tactile sensing technology. Why did you choose this technical path?
Once we started investigating tactile sensors, we understood our needs. We wanted sensors that closely mimic what we have under our fingertip skin. Physiological studies have well documented the capabilities humans have at their fingertips — knowing what we touch, what kind of material it is, how forces are distributed, and whether it is moving into the right position as our brain controls our hands. We knew that replicating these capabilities on a robot hand’s fingertips would help considerably.
When we surveyed existing technologies, we found many types, including vision-based tactile sensors with tri-color optics and other simpler designs. We decided to integrate the best of these into an engineering-robust solution that works well without being overly complicated, keeping cost, reliability, and sensitivity within a satisfactory range, thus ultimately developing a monochromatic vision-based tactile sensing technique. This is fundamentally an engineering approach rather than a purely scientific one, since a great deal of foundational research already existed. With the growing realization of the necessity of tactile data, all of this will advance hand in hand.
Last year, DAIMON launched a multi-dimensional, high-resolution, high-frequency vision-based tactile sensor. Compared with traditional tactile sensors, where does its core advantage lie? Which industries could it potentially transform?
The key features of our sensors are the density of distributed force measurement and the deformation we can capture over the area of a fingertip. I believe we have the highest density in terms of sensing units. That is one very important metric. The other is dynamics: the frequency and bandwidth — how quickly we can detect force changes, transmit signals, and process them in real time. Other important aspects are largely engineering-related, such as reliability, drift, durability of the soft surface, and resistance to interference from magnetic, optical, or environmental factors.
A growing number of researchers and companies are recognizing the importance of tactile sensing and adopting our technology. I believe the advances in tactile sensing will elevate the entire community and industry to a higher level. One of our potential customers is deploying humanoid robots in a small convenience store, with densely packed shelves where shelf space is at a premium. The robot needs to reach into very tight spaces — tighter than books on a shelf — to pick out an object. Current two-jaw parallel grippers cannot fit into most of these spaces. Observing how humans pick up objects, you clearly need at least three slim fingers to touch and roll the object toward you and secure it. Thus, we are starting to see very specific needs where tactile sensing capabilities are essential.
From Academia to Startup
After 40 years in academia — founding the HKUST Robotics Institute, earning prestigious honors including IEEE Fellow, and serving as Editor-in-Chief of IEEE TASE — what motivated you to found DAIMON Robotics?
I have come a long way. I started learning robotics during my PhD at Carnegie Mellon, where there were truly remarkable groups working on locomotion under Marc Raibert, who founded Boston Dynamics, and on manipulation under my advisor, Matt Mason, a leader in the field. We have been working on dexterous manipulation, not only at Carnegie Mellon, but globally for many years.
However, progress has been limited for a long time, especially in building dexterous hands and making them work. Only recently have locomotion robots truly taken off, and only in the last few years have we begun to see major advancements in robot hands. There is clearly room for advancing manipulation capabilities, which would enable robots to do work like humans. While at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, I saw increasingly greater people entering this area in the form of students and postdoctoral researchers. We wanted to jumpstart our effort by leveraging the available capital and talent resources.
Fortunately, one of my postdocs, Dr. Duan Jianghua, has a strong sense for commercial opportunities. Recognizing the rapid growth of robotics market and the unique value that our vision-based tactile sensing technology could bring, together we started DAIMON Robotics, and it has progressed well. The community has grown tremendously in China, Japan, Korea, the U.S., and Europe.
Robots equipped with DAIMON technology have been deployed in factory settings. The company aims to enable robots to achieve “embodied intelligence” and close the gap between what they can see and what they can feel.DAIMON Robotics
Business Model and Commercial Strategy
What is DAIMON’s current business model and strategic focus? What role does the dataset release play in your commercial strategy?
We started as a device company focused on making highly capable tactile sensors, especially for robot hands. But as technology and business developed, everyone realized it is not just about one component, rather the entire technology chain: devices, data of adequate quality and quantity, and finally the right framework to build, train, and deploy models on robots in real application environments.
Our business strategy is best described as “3D”: Devices, Data, and Deployment. We build devices for data collection, our own ecosystem, and for deploying them in our partners’ potential application domains. This enables the collection of real-world tactile-rich data and complete closed-loop validation. This will become an integral part of the 3D business model. Most startups in this space are following a similar path until eventually some may become more specialized or more tightly integrated with other companies. For now, it is mostly vertical integration.
Embodied Skills and the Convergence Moment
You’ve introduced the concept of “embodied skills” as essential for humanoid robots to move beyond having just an advanced AI “brain.” What prompted this insight? What new capabilities could embodied skills enable? After the rapid evolution of models and hardware over the past two years, has your definition or roadmap for embodied skills evolved?
We have come a long way now see a convergence point where electrical, electronic, and mechatronic hardware technologies have advanced tremendously in last two decades. Robots are now fully electric, do not require hydraulics, because hardware has evolved rapidly. Modern electronics provide tremendous bandwidth with high torques. If we can build intelligence into these systems, we can create truly humanoid robots with the ability to operate in unstructured environments, make decisions, and take actions autonomously.
“Our vision is for robots to achieve robust manipulation capabilities and evolve into reliable partners for humans.” —Prof. Michael Yu Wang, DAIMON Robotics
AI has arrived at exactly the right time. Enormous resources have been invested in AI development, especially large language models, which are now being generalized into world models that enable physical AI capabilities. We would like to see these manifested in real-world systems.
While both AI and core hardware technologies continue to evolve, the focus is much clearer now. For example, human-sized robots are preferred in a home environment. This is an exciting domain with a promise of great societal benefit if we can eventually achieve safe, reliable, and cost-effective robots.
The Road to Real-World Deployment
Today, many robots can deliver impressive demos, yet there remains a gap before they truly enter real-world applications. What could be a potential trigger for real-world deployment? Which scenarios are most likely to achieve large-scale deployment first?
I think the road toward large-scale deployment of generalist robots is still long, but we are starting to see signs of feasibility within specific domains. It is very similar to autonomous vehicles, where we are yet to see full deployment of robo-taxis, while we have already started to find mobile robots and smaller vehicles widely deployed in the hospitality industry. Virtually every major hotel in China now has a delivery robot — no arms, just a vehicle that picks up items from the hotel lobby (e.g., food deliveries). The delivery person just loads the food and selects the room number. It is up to the robot thereafter to navigate and reach the guest’s room, which includes using the elevator, to deliver the food. This is already nearly 100 percent deployed in major Chinese hotels.
Hotel and restaurant robots are viewed as a model for deploying humanoid robots in specific domains like overnight drugstores and convenience stores. I expect complete deployment in such settings within a short timeframe, followed by other applications. Overall, we can expect autonomous robots, including humanoids, to progressively penetrate specific sectors, delivering value in each and expanding into others.
Ultimately, our vision is for robots to achieve robust manipulation capabilities and evolve into reliable partners for humans. By seamlessly integrating into our homes and daily lives, they will genuinely benefit and serve humanity.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your friends at IEEE Spectrum robotics. We also post a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months. Please send us your events for inclusion.
Sony AI’s latest research, published on the cover of Nature, addresses a long-standing challenge in physical AI: Can a high-speed autonomous system master the complex perception and dynamic control required to compete against professional athletes?
In this video, we present Ringbot Quad, a novel monocycle robot with four legs that combines wheeled and legged locomotion on a single platform. Ringbot Quad is designed as a unique monocycle mechanism that replaces the traditional drivetrain with four individually actuated driving modules, each integrated with an articulated leg. Ringbot Quad aims to provide versatile and efficient mobility through two distinct locomotion modes. In driving mode, the four legs assist with balance and steering, while in walking mode, they fully support the body for quadruped locomotion. By switching between these modes, Ringbot Quad can navigate diverse terrains and overcome obstacles that are difficult for either wheeled or legged systems alone.
Humanoid robots have beaten human runners in a Beijing half-marathon, marking a breakthrough in China’s rapidly advancing robotics industry. More than 100 robots competed alongside 12,000 people in the 21-kilometer race, with three crossing the finish line ahead of any human.
Watch AthenaZero juggle barehanded using on-board sensory feedback only. No motion capture. No funnels. No help adding the third ball. The robot learns to adapt to the uncertainties from contact and the appropriate hand-eye coordination.
From the look of this, it’s based on data capture from humans. What I want to know is, what this will look like when it’s not based on data capture from humans.
Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems propose a method to measure the efficiency of soft electrostatic actuators, enabling systematic evaluation of electrical-to-mechanical energy conversion. Using Peano-HASEL actuators, they demonstrate efficiencies up to 63.6%, over three times higher than previously reported, and validate the approach across other actuator types, paving the way for more energy-efficient soft electrostatic robotic systems.
Already deployed in North America, quadruped robots provide continuous patrol, real-time monitoring, and faster incident detection across residential communities—day and night.
This CMU Robotics Institute talk is from CMU’s Raj Reddy, on “The Future of AI : Doomers vs. Abundance.”
The last decade has seen extraordinary advances in AI. The potential arrival of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) has profound implications for future of our society. We anticipate a world where AI assistants and humanoid robots will perform most of the tasks requiring human expertise and skill at 10% of current costs. In this paradigm, essential services—including food, housing, energy, education, healthcare, and transportation—will be provided via Universal Basic Services, signaling a historic shift from a society of scarcity to one of abundance. This transformation raises a critical concern: widespread displacement of traditional labor. What is the human role when AI can do everything? This talk presents an alternative scenario: a “Human-in-the-Loop” evolution. In this model, humans transition into high-level supervisory roles, collaborating with AGI to train robots in novel skills and adapt them to unforeseen tasks. We explore this as the “Maharaja Model” where technology serves humanity so comprehensively that work will be optional for humans. Finally, we will discuss how institutions like the Robotics Institute must lead this transition, developing the hybrid technologies and ethical frameworks necessary to bridge the gap between our current economy and a robot-assisted future.
Tom Burick has always considered himself a builder. Over the years he’s designed robots, constructed a vintage teardrop trailer, and most recently, led a group of students in building a full-scale replica of a pivotal 1940s computer.
Burick is a technology instructor at PS Academy in Gilbert, Ariz., a middle and high school for students with autism and other specialized learning needs. At the start of the 2025–26 school year, he began a project with his students to build a full-scale replica of the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer, or ENIAC, for the 80th anniversary of the historic computer’s construction. ENIAC was one of the world’s first programmable electronic computers. When it was built, it was about one thousand times as fast as other machines.
Before becoming a teacher, Burick owned a robotics company for a decade in the 2000s. But when a financial downturn forced him to close the business, he turned to teaching. “I had so many amazing people help me when I was young [who] really gave me their time and resources, and really changed the trajectory of my life,” Burick says. “I thought I need to pay that forward.”
Becoming a Roboticist
As a young child in Latrobe, Pa., Burick watched the television show Lost in Space, which includes a robot character who protects the family. “He was the young boy’s best friend, and I was so captivated by that. I remember thinking to myself, I want that in my life. And that started that lifelong love affair with robotics and technology.”
He started building toy robots out of anything he could find, and in junior high school, he began adding electronics. “By early high school, I was building full-fledged autonomous, microprocessor-controlled machines,” he says. At age 15, he built a 150-pound steel firefighting robot, for which he won awards from IEEE and other organizations.
Burick kept building robots and reached out for help from local colleges and universities. He first got in touch with a student at Carnegie Mellon University, who invited him to visit campus. “My parents drove me down the next weekend, and he gave me a tour of the robotics lab. I was mesmerized. He sent me home with college textbooks and piles of metal and gears and wires,” Burick says. He would read the textbook a page at a time, reading it again and again until he felt he had an understanding of it. Then, to help fill gaps in his understanding, he got in touch with a robotics instructor at Saint Vincent College, in his hometown of Latrobe, who let him sit in on classes. Each of these adults, he says, “helped change the trajectory of my life.”
Toward the end of high school, Burick realized that college wouldn’t be the right environment for him. “I was drawn to real-world problem-solving rather than structured coursework and I chose to continue along that path,” he says. Additionally, Burick has dyscalculia, which makes traditional mathematics more challenging for him. “It pushed me to develop alternative methods of engineering.”
The ENIAC replica Burick’s students built precisely matches what the original computer would have looked like before it was disassembled in the 1950s. Robert Gamboa
When he graduated, he worked in several tech jobs before starting his own company. In 2000, he opened a computer retail store and adjacent robotics business, White Box Robotics. The idea for the company came when Burick was building a “white box” PC from standard, off-the-shelf components, and realized there was no comparable product for robotics.
So, he started developing a modular, general-purpose platform that applied white box PC standards to mobile robots. “The robot’s chassis was like a box of Legos,” he says. You could click together two torsos to double its payload, switch out the drive system, or swap its head for a different set of sensors. He filed utility and design patents for the platform, called the 914 PC-Bot, and after merging with a Canadian defense robotics company called Frontline Robotics, started production. They sold about 200 robots in 17 countries, Burick says.
Then the 2008 financial crisis hit. White Box Robotics held on for a couple of years, shuttering in late 2010. “I got to live my life’s dream for 10 years,” he says. After closing White Box, “there was some soul searching” about what to do next. He recalled the impact his own mentors had, and decided to pay it forward by teaching.
Neurodiversity as a Superpower
In 2013, Burick started working in a vocational training program for young adults living with autism. The program didn’t have a technical arm, so he started one and ran it until 2019, when he was hired to be a technology instructor at PS Academy Arizona.
Burick and one of his students assemble the base for one of ENIAC’s three portable function tables, which contained banks of switches that stored numerical constants. Bri Mason
Burick feels he can connect with his students, because he is also neurodivergent. Throughout his childhood, he was told what he wasn’t able to do because of his dyscalculia diagnosis. “People tell you what it takes, but they never tell you what it gives,” Burick says.
In adulthood, he realized that some of his strengths are linked to dyscalculia, too, like strong 3D spatial reasoning. “I have this CAD program that runs in my head 24 hours a day,” he says. “I think the reason I was successful in robotics, truly, was because of the dyscalculia…. To me, [it] has always been a superpower.”
Whenever his students say something disparaging about living with autism, he shares his own experience. “You need to have maybe just a bit more tenacity than others, because there are parts of it you do have to fight through, but you come through with gifts and strengths,” he tells them.
And Burick’s classes aim to play to those strengths. “I didn’t want my technology program to feel like craft hour,” he says. Instead, through projects like the ENIAC replica, students can leverage traits many of them share, like the abilities to hyperfocus and to precisely repeat tasks.
Recreating ENIAC
Burick has taught his students about ENIAC for several years. While reading about it, he learned that the massive, 27-tonne computer was dismantled and partially destroyed after being decommissioned in 1955. Although a few of ENIAC’s 40 original panels are on display at museums, “there was no hope of ever seeing it together again. We wanted to give the world that experience,” Burick says.
He and his students started by learning about ENIAC, and even Burick was surprised by how complex the 80-year-old computer was. They built a one-twelfth scale model to help the students better understand what it looked like. Seeing the students light up, Burick became confident in their ability to move onto the full-scale model, and he started ordering supplies.
ENIAC was composed of 40 large metal panels arranged in a U-shape that housed its many vacuum tubes, resistors, capacitors, and switches. Twenty of the panels were accumulators with the same design, so the students started with these, then worked through smaller groupings of panels. The repeating panels brought symmetry to ENIAC, Burick says, but it was also one of the main challenges of recreating it. If one part was slightly out of place, the next one would be too and the mistake would compound.
The students installed 500 simulated vacuum tubes in each of the panels here, for a total of 18,000 vacuum tubes.Robert Gamboa
Once they constructed the panels, they added ENIAC’s three function tables, which stored numerical constants in banks of switches, then two punch-card machines. Finally, they installed 18,000 simulated vacuum tubes. In total, the project used nearly 300 square meters of thick-ream cardboard, 1,600 hot-glue-gun sticks, and 7 gallons of black paint.
The scale of the machine—and his students’ work—left Burick in awe. “By the time we were done, I felt like I was in a room full of scientists,” he says.
Previously, Burick’s students built an 8-foot-long drivable Tesla Cybertruck (“complete with a 400-watt stereo system and a subwoofer”) and he plans to keep the momentum with another recreation—maybe from the Apollo moon missions.
“I go to work every day, and I feel passionate about robotics [and] technology. I get to share that passion with the students,” Burick says. “I get to feel what it’s like to be in the position of the people that helped me. It closes that loop, and I find that really rewarding.”
Certain U.S. firms, such as Ghost Robotics, may benefit, because they are among the few companies that can handle demand for ground robots from U.S. government buyers. Ground robots are finished products at the top of the chain of added value, unlike semiconductors, which are “lower” down the value chain since they are always components of other products. If the proposed ground robot ban were to move lower down the value chain, preventing American robot makers from buying Chinese-made components, those companies might have a harder time fulfilling U.S. demand. The U.S. robotics industry is in a pickle: Companies would benefit from eliminating Chinese competitors at their level of the value chain, so long as they can retain their Chinese suppliers.
The U.S. does not have a serious, overarching strategy to guiding its approach to the U.S.-China techno-economic competition.” —Stephen Ezell, Information Technology & Innovation Foundation
It’s still early for the ground robotics industry in the U.S. Adoption is not yet that high, nor are the supply chains mature yet. South Korea and Japan make many crucial robot components, for example, so if they or other countries the U.S. considers friendly can replace Chinese components the U.S. government declares unsafe, the U.S. robotics industry may be able to adapt and build its competitiveness.
For other technologies, it’s Chinese tech all the way down the chain. The UAS market, for example, is dominated by Chinese producers. The U.S. Department of Commerce has sought to ban them for more than a year, and in December, the FCC added UAS’s to its import ban list, called the Covered List.
“That was a problem with the drone ban,” Chan says. “Rather than thinking about how you would ramp up domestic production and then have this tapering off of dependence on Chinese drones, it was a sharp and fast switch, which left industry in the lurch.”
Many Supply Chains Already Extend Beyond China
The FCC’s March ban on new foreign-made routers was a surprise to that industry. In 2025, the U.S. imported nearly US $ 31 billion of routers, according to the Global Electronics Association. Yet China produced only 1.1 percent of that, by value, down from around 20.5 percent of the U.S. market share in 2019. In 2025, the top three sources of routers in the U.S. by value were Vietnam, Mexico, and Thailand, together accounting for 68.4 percent of the market.
“A lot of this is more nuanced than the regulatory approaches suggest. The real vulnerabilities are outdated software, patches that haven’t been installed, unchanged default passwords,” says Global Electronics Association economist Shawn DuBravac, one of the authors of the association’s report.
On 14 April, the FCC issued conditional approvals for U.S. distribution of certain Netgear and Adtran routers, along with Sees.ai UAS’s. U.S.-headquartered Netgear manufactures routers in Vietnam and Taiwan, according to Consumer Reports. DuBravac says the fact that the FCC took only about three weeks to exempt those imports is positive, but that since the exemptions last only 18 months, manufacturers must still contend with a lot of uncertainty.
“If you’re a company you’re going to have to have clear visibility into your suppliers and into your suppliers’ suppliers,” DuBravac says. “There’s much, much more scrutiny.”
The last several U.S. administrations have restricted a growing list of Chinese tech, across both political parties. “I see this as bipartisan,” Chan says, “and I would expect continued scrutiny.”
Companies building technology subject to security controls should also prepare for speed. A White House interagency task force determined that foreign routers were a security risk, leading to the FCC’s Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau announcing first the UAS ban and later the router ban. Because UAS’s use radio to communicate, they are subject to FCC oversight. Both security-related determinations, unlike conventional FCC rule making, did not require public notice or a commenting period.
“There hasn’t been much of a back and forth process into [the UAS] rule,” Chan says.
The electronics industry is also accustomed to more dialogue with trade-related changes, DuBravac says. “When you see a problem, you open an investigation and stakeholders can submit input into that investigation so it feels a little more like a two-way conversation, so you’re actually hearing from industry on this.” So far, that has not happened.
Instead, even analysts that welcome U.S. security scrutiny of Chinese technology are finding the fits and starts of the associated policymaking jarring, says Stephen Ezell of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a think tank in Washington, D.C.: “The U.S. does not have a serious, overarching strategy guiding its approach to the U.S.-China techno-economic competition.”
When the robotics engineering field that Maja Matarić wanted to work in didn’t exist, she helped create it. In 2005 she helped define the new area of socially assistive robotics.
As an associate professor of computer science, neuroscience, and pediatrics at the University of Southern California, in Los Angeles, she developed robots to provide personalized therapy and care through social interactions.
Maja Matarić
Employer
University of Southern California, Los Angeles
Job Title
Professor of computer science, neuroscience, and pediatrics
Member grade
Fellow
Alma maters
University of Kansas and MIT
The robots could have conversations, play games, and respond to emotions.
Today the IEEE Fellow is a professor at USC. She studies how robots can help students with anxiety and depression undergo cognitive behavioral therapy. CBT focuses on changing a person’s negative thought patterns, behaviors, and emotional responses.
For her work, she received a 2025 Robotics Medal from MassRobotics, which recognizes female researchers advancing robotics. The Boston-based nonprofit provides robotics startups with a workspace, prototyping facilities, mentorship, and networking opportunities.
When receiving the award at the ceremony in Boston, Matarić was overcome with joy, she says.
“I’ve been very fortunate to be honored with several awards, which I am grateful for. But there was something very special about getting the MassRobotics medal, because I knew at least half the people in the room,” she says. “Everyone was just smiling, and there was a great sense of love.”
Seeing herself as an engineer
Matarić grew up in Belgrade, Serbia. Her father was an engineer, and her mother was a writer. After her father died when she was 16, Matarić and her mother moved to the United States.
She credits her father for igniting her interest in engineering, and her uncle who worked as an aerospace engineer for introducing her to computer science.
Matarić says she didn’t consider herself an engineer until she joined USC’s faculty, since she always had worked in computer science.
“In retrospect, I’ve always been an engineer,” Matarić says. “But I didn’t set out specifically thinking of myself as one—which is just one of the many things I like to convey to young people: You don’t always have to know exactly everything in advance.”
Maja Matarić and her lab are exploring how socially assistive robots can help improve the communication skills of children with autism spectrum disorder. National Science Foundation News
While pursuing her bachelor’s degree in computer science at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, she was introduced to industrial robotics through a textbook. After earning her degree in 1987, she had an opportunity to continue her education as a graduate student at MIT’s AI Lab (now the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab). During her first year, she explored the different research projects being conducted by faculty members, she said in a 2010 oral history conducted by the IEEE History Center. She met IEEE Life Fellow Rodney Brooks, who was working on novel reactive and behavior-based robotic systems. His work so excited her that she joined his lab and conducted her master’s thesis under his tutelage.
Inspired by the way animals use landmarks to navigate, Matarić developed Toto, the first navigating behavior-based robot. Toto used distributed models to map the AI Lab building where Matarić worked and plan its path to different rooms. Toto used sonar to detect walls, doors, and furniture, according to Matarić’s paper, “The Robotics Primer.”
After earning her master’s degree in AI and robotics in 1990, she continued to work under Brooks as a doctoral student, pioneering distributed algorithms that allowed a team of up to 20 robots to execute complex tasks in tandem, including searching for objects and exploring their environment.
Matarić earned her Ph.D. in AI and robotics in 1994 and joined Brandeis University, in Waltham, Mass., as an assistant professor of computer science. There she founded the Interaction Lab, where she developed autonomous robots that work together to accomplish tasks.
Three years later, she relocated to California and joined USC’s Viterbi School of Engineering as an assistant professor in computer science and neuroscience.
In 2002 she helped to found the Center for Robotics and Embedded Systems (now the Robotics and Autonomous Systems Center). The RASC focuses on research into human-centric and scalable robotic systems and promotes interdisciplinary partnerships across USC.
Matarić’s shift in her research came after she gave birth to her first child in 1998. When her daughter was a bit older and asked Matarić why she worked with robots, she wanted to be able to “say something better than ‘I publish a lot of research papers,’ or ‘it’s well-recognized,’” she says.
“In academia, you can be in a leadership role and still do research. It’s a wonderful and important opportunity that lets academics be on top of our field and also train the next generation of students and help the next generation of faculty colleagues.”
“Kids don’t consider those good answers, and they’re probably right,” she says. “This made me realize I was in a position to do something different. And I really wanted the answer to my daughter’s future question to be, ‘Mommy’s robots help people.’”
Matarić and her doctoral student David Feil-Seifer presented a paper defining socially assistive robotics at the 2005 International Conference on Rehabilitation Robotics. It was the only paper that talked about helping people complete tasks and learn skills by speaking with them rather than by performing physical jobs, she says.
Feil-Seifer is now a professor of computer science and engineering at the University of Nevada in Reno.
At the same time, she founded the Interaction Lab at USC and made its focus creating robots that provide social, rather than physical, support.
“At this point in my career journey, I’ve matured to a place where I don’t want to do just curiosity-driven research alone,” she says. “Plenty of what my team and I do today is still driven by curiosity, but it is answering the question: ‘How can we help someone live a better life?’”
In 2006 she was promoted to full professor and made the senior associate dean for research in USC’s Viterbi School of Engineering. In 2012 she became vice dean for research.
“In academia, you can be in a leadership role and still do research,” she says. “It’s a wonderful and important opportunity that lets academics be on top of our field and also train the next generation of students and help the next generation of faculty colleagues.”
Research in socially assistive robotics
One of the longest research projects Matarić has led at her Interaction Lab is exploring how socially assistive robots can help improve the communication skills of children with autism spectrum disorder. ASD is a lifelong neurological condition that affects the way people interact with others, and the way they learn. Children with ASD often struggle with social behaviors such as reading nonverbal cues, playing with others, and making eye contact.
Matarić and her team developed a robot, Bandit, that can play games with a child and give the youngster words of affirmation. Bandit is 56 centimeters tall and has a humanlike head, torso, and arms. Its head can pan and tilt. The robot uses two FireWire cameras as its eyes, and it has a movable mouth and eyebrows, allowing it to exhibit a variety of facial expressions, according to the IEEE Spectrum’s robots guide. Its torso is attached to a wheeled base.
The study showed that when interacting with Bandit, children with ASD exhibited social behaviors that were out of the ordinary for them, such as initiating play and imitating the robot.
Matarić and her team also studied how the robot could serve as a social and cognitive aid for elderly people and stroke patients. Bandit was programmed to instruct and motivate users to perform daily movement exercises such as seated aerobics.
Maja Matarić and doctoral student Amy O’Connell testing Blossom, which is being used to study how it can aid students with anxiety or depression.University of Southern California
Over the years, Matarić’s lab developed other robots including Kiwi and Blossom. Kiwi, which looked like an owl, helped children with ASD learn social and cognitive skills, helped motivate elderly people living alone to be more physically active, and mediated discussions among family members. Blossom, originally developed at Cornell, was adapted by the Interaction Lab to make it less expensive and personalizable for individuals. The robot is being used to study how it can aid students with anxiety or depression to practice cognitive behavioral therapy.
Matarić’s line of research began when she learned that large language model (LLM) chatbots were being promoted to help people with mental health struggles, she said in an episode of the AMA Medical News podcast.
“It is generally not easy to get [an appointment with a] therapist, or there might not be insurance coverage,” she said. “These, combined with the rates of anxiety and depression, created a real need.”
That made the chatbot idea appealing, she says, but she was interested to see if they were effective compared with a friendly robot such as Blossom.
Matarić and her team used the same LLMs to power CBT practice with a chatbot and with Blossom. They ran a two-week study in the USC dorms, where students were randomly assigned to complete CBT exercises daily with either a chatbot or the robot. Participants filled out a clinical assessment to measure their psychiatric distress before and after each session.
The study showed that students who interacted with the robot experienced a significant decrease in their mental state, Matarić said in the podcast, and students who interacted with the chatbot did not.
“Joining an [IEEE] society has an impact, and it can be personal. That’s why I recommend my students join the organization—because it’s important to get out there and get connected.”
She and her team also reviewed transcripts of conversations between the students and the robot to evaluate how well the LLM responded to the participants. They found the robot was more effective than the chatbot, even though both were using the same model.
Based on those findings, in 2024 Matarić received a grant from the U.S. National Institute of Mental Health to conduct a six-week clinical trial to explore how effective a socially assistive robot could be at delivering CBT practice. The trial, currently underway, also is expected to study how Blossom can be personalized to adapt to each user’s preferences and progress, including the way the robot moves, which exercises it recommends, and what feedback it gives.
During the trial, the 120 students participating are wearing Fitbits to study their physiologic responses. The participants fill out a clinical assessment to measure their psychiatric distress before and after each session.
Data including the participants’ feelings of relating to the robot, intrinsic motivation, engagement, and adherence will be assessed by the research team, Matarić says.
She says she’s proud of the graduate students working on this project, and seeing them grow as engineers is one of the most rewarding parts of working in academia.
“Engineers generally don’t anticipate having to work with human study participants and needing to understand psychology in addition to the hardcore engineering,” she says. “So the students who choose to do this research are just wonderful, caring people.”
Matarić credits IEEE Life Fellow George Bekey, the founding editor in chief of the IEEE Transactions on Robotics, for recruiting her for the USC engineering faculty position. He knew of her work through her graduate advisor Brooks, who published a paper in the journal that introduced reactive control and the subsumption architecture, which became the foundation of a new way to control robots. It is his most cited paper. Bekey, who was editor in chief at the time, helped guide Brooks through the challenging review process. Matarić joined Brooks’s lab at MIT two years after its publication, and her work on Toto built on that foundation.
“Joining a society has an impact, and it can be personal,” she says. “That’s why I recommend my students join the organization—because it’s important to get out there and get connected.”
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