Automated with Brian Heater

Physical AI is moving fast. But Daniela Rus says the future of robotics will not be defined by viral humanoid robot demos alone. The real challenge is building robots that can understand the physical world, make safe decisions in real time, and work reliably outside controlled lab environments. In this episode of Automated, Brian Heater speaks with Daniela Rus, Director of MIT CSAIL, about humanoi...

Physical AI is moving fast. But Matthew Johnson-Roberson says robotics is still missing something fundamental. The field has data, models, and momentum, but it still does not have the simple learning objective that helped language models scale so quickly. In this episode of Automated, Brian Heater speaks with Matthew Johnson-Roberson, founding dean of Vanderbilt’s College of Connected Computing, a...

Physical AI looks closer than ever. But the hardest part in robotics is not getting a machine to do one impressive task on camera. It is building systems that can improve from real-world experience, handle edge cases, and scale across different robots and environments. In this episode of Automated, Brian Heater speaks with Sergey Levine of Physical Intelligence about why robotics has reached an in...

Home robots have been promised for decades. Most of them did not fail because the ambition was too small. They failed because the technology was not yet good enough to understand people, adapt to real homes, or earn a place in daily life. In this episode of Automated, Brian Heater speaks with Colin Angle, founder and CEO of Familiar Machines & Magic and co-founder of iRobot, about why this mom...

Self-driving cars were supposed to be everywhere by now. They are not. And the reason is not what most people think. In this episode of Automated, Brian Heater speaks with Martial Hebert, Dean of Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Computer Science, about the reality behind decades of robotics and AI development. Martial has spent more than 40 years at the Robotics Institute and worked on some...

Humanoid robots are everywhere right now. From viral demos to bold promises about home automation, it often feels like the future has already arrived. But behind the scenes, the reality is far more complex. In this episode of Automated, Brian Heater speaks with Bren Pierce, founder of Kinisi Robotics and co-founder of Bear Robotics, about what it actually takes to build and deploy robots in the re...

Last-mile delivery is one of the most expensive and inefficient parts of the global supply chain. While goods can travel across oceans for just a few dollars, getting them from a local hub to a customer’s door remains disproportionately costly. In this episode of Automated, Brian Heater speaks with Ali Kashani, CEO of Serve Robotics, about the realities of deploying delivery robots in the real wor...

Robotics is advancing quickly, but building systems that can operate reliably in the real world remains one of the most complex challenges in technology. In this episode of Automated, Brian Heater speaks with Zachary Jackowski of Boston Dynamics about the shift from research to commercialization and why generalization is emerging as the defining problem in modern robotics. Zachary explains how Bos...

Robotics is advancing quickly, but real-world deployment is still far more difficult than most people expect. In this episode of Automated, Brian Heater speaks with Ranjay Krishna, a professor at the University of Washington and former researcher at Ai2, about the fundamental challenges preventing robots from working reliably outside controlled environments, and why solving the data problem is key...

Billions are flowing into humanoid robots. But on the factory floor, nobody cares what the robot looks like.  In this episode of Automated, Brian Heater speaks with Erik Nieves, CEO and co-founder of Plus One Robotics, about the gap between robotics investment and real-world deployment. Recorded live at the A3 Business Forum in Miami, Nieves explains why enterprise customers have one question...

Robot vacuums have been on the market for over 20 years and are still in fewer than 20 percent of US homes. In this episode of Automated, Brian Heater speaks with Gary Cohen, CEO of iRobot and the brand behind Roomba, about what it actually takes to rebuild one of the most iconic names in consumer robotics. Gary breaks down the shift from feature-led to consumer-led product development, explaining...

Home robotics has been promised for decades, but most products still struggle to meet everyday expectations. In this episode of Automated , Brian Heater speaks with Mehul Nariyawala of Matic Robots about why the robot vacuum category became the beachhead for home robots, and what it actually takes to ship a product people trust. Mehul breaks down the shift from “default trust” to “default skeptici...

“We wanted to ship before we talked.” That’s how Rob Cochran, co-founder of Fauna Robotics, explains the company’s decision to stay in stealth until its humanoid robot was already in customers’ hands. In this episode of Automated , Brian Heater speaks with Cochran about launching a humanoid startup in one of the most competitive and uncertain moments in robotics. Instead of targeting factories or...

“Nobody wants a robot.” That’s how Péter Fankhauser, CEO of ANYbotics, reframes industrial automation. Customers are not buying quadrupeds for spectacle. They are investing in solutions that solve real operational problems. In this episode of Automated, Brian Heater speaks with the ETH Zurich spinout founder about turning cutting-edge robotics research into a commercially deployed inspection platf...

Talk about humanoid robots is everywhere, but how useful are they in industrial settings? In this live episode of Automated, Brian Heater talks with Mikell Taylor, former Amazon Robotics leader and current head of General Motors’ Autonomous Robotics Center. Recorded in front of an audience at A3’s Business Forum, the conversation dives into safety, collaboration, automation at scale, and why the b...

Brian Gerkey believes deeply in the importance of open-sourcing robotics technology. His career, with time spent at Willow Garage, Open Robotics, and now as CTO at Intrinsic, has been guided by this philosophy. In this episode of Automated , Gerkey explains why “simple” tasks like picking and placing remain some of the toughest problems to solve, especially in high-variability environments. We exp...

The most interesting work around AI doesn’t occur at the height of the hype cycle. Kence Anderson has watched promising ideas overperform in demos, underperform in reality, and eventually re-emerge as something more modest and more useful. This episode focuses on that middle ground, where engineering judgment replaces speculation and progress looks slower than the headlines suggest. An engineer wh...

After three decades in consumer robotics, Colin Angle is still asking the hardest questions about trust, value, and what robots are actually for. Colin Angle, co-founder and former CEO of iRobot, joins Automated for a candid conversation about the rise of consumer robotics, the collapse of the Amazon acquisition, and what comes next for physical AI. He explains why Roomba was never a “science proj...

The current interest in robotics follows a pattern we’ve seen before. Eric Danziger has spent years working through those cycles and offers perspective on how things are actually playing out. Invisible AI CEO Eric Danziger joins Automated to cut through the hype around humanoids, self-driving cars, and AI demos. Drawing from his time in the U.S. Army, Carnegie Mellon’s robotics program, and Silico...

Robotics has a habit of compressing timelines in theory and stretching them out in practice. Few people are better positioned to talk about that gap than Vincent Vanhoucke, whose work spans the early days of deep learning at Google and the ongoing challenge of scaling autonomous systems at Waymo. Vincent Vanhoucke, distinguished engineer at Waymo and former leader at Google Robotics and Google Bra...

True Ventures was an early investor in key robotics startups like Diligent and Bear Flag, thanks, in part, to Rohit Sharma’s thoughtful eye. The venture partner discusses how the firm determines early stage successes and charts his family’s journey from India farm to Palo Alto boardroom.  From ag robotics and humanoids to long investment timelines, founder empathy, and why optimism matters in...

‘‘Twas the night before Automated and all through TRI, not a robot was stirring, just Erin McColl and I. We watched several YouTube videos with great glee, for the latest in AI and autonomy.”  Welcome to this end-of-year special where host Brian Heater and Toyota Research Institute’s Erin McColl break down the most compelling robot videos of 2025. What’s real, what’s hype, and what actually m...

Ahead of Disney’s Avatar: Fire and Ash’s release, we’ve got one hot conversation with Ben Procter. The film’s production designer, who previously worked on the Transformers series and Prometheus, discusses how real-world robots influenced the sequel’s autonomous systems and mechs. From Avatar’s crab suits to swarm construction robots, this conversation dives deep into how real robotics, industrial...

For more than 30 years, University of Massachusetts Lowell professor Holly Yanco has been a leading mind in human-robot interaction. It seems the rest of the automation industry may finally be catching up with her decades of research. Professor Yanco delves into the complexities of human–robot interaction, from telepresence robots and robot trust to assistive tech, exoskeleton advances, and the ch...

For Grace Brown, a humanoid robot future is a hopeful future. Andromeda’s Abi is designed to build connections in an increasingly isolated world, focused on older adults in care facilities. It’s a group that is a prime target for transformative technologies, but is too often overlooked. In this episode, she talks about designing Abi, the robot bringing real connection back into aged care, the jaw-...