Scaling Robotics

In Episode 4, we speak with Ashutosh Saxena, CEO and Founder of Torque AGI. Torque builds robotic foundation models for Fortune 100 companies like John Deere.Previously, Ashutosh took a company public and got his PhD under Andrew Ng at Stanford. He's also our first guest with a Wikipedia page!We discuss the gap between demos and production autonomy, why physics-grounded AI reaches reliability faster than pure data approaches, and Ash's contrarian take on building generalist robots: deploy specific models first, let real robots collect edge cases, and iterate fast. Plus, why he thinks the industry is wrong about needing trillions of data points for learned models!Timestamps(00:00) Intro(00:48) About TorqueAGI(01:54) Demo vs. Production Autonomy(03:44) Reliability and Interpretability in Autonomy(06:48) Cross-Domain Learning(10:38) Milestones for Production(12:35) The Importance of Edge Inference(14:27) The Road to Generalist Robots(15:54) How to Collect Data(19:47) The Biggest Bottleneck Today(21:24) Closing

In Episode 3, we speak with Amit Moran, former CTO of Civ Robotics (construction robots for solar) and co-founder of Indoor Robotics (autonomous indoor drones for security). We discuss what it actually takes to scale robot fleets from a CTO's perspective: designing for modularity, setting BOM targets from day one, building self-healing systems, and saving data you don't yet know you'll need.It's the kind of advice you only get from someone who's scaled fleets twice and learned the hard way.𝐓𝐈𝐌𝐄𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐌𝐏𝐒(00:04) Intro(01:45) Experience at Indoor and Civ(02:57) Core principles for scaling(6:49) Hardware and Software Modularity(9:45) Infrastructure Rigor vs. Velocity(12:46) Reliability in Autonomy(14:11) Reliability & Fail-Safes(16:00) Self-Healing(18:49) Observability(24:04) BOM & Margins(29:56) Build vs. Buy(31:18) Closing

In episode 2, we speak with Matan Yemini, a seasoned operator with over a decade of experience in drones and industrial automation at teams such as Amazon Robotics/Prime Air and Airobotics.He is now the COO at Rebellion Defense.In this episode, we discuss pragmatic lessons from scaling fleets and delivering real ROI for robotics customers. The insights are often unglamorous, but they require attention to detail and a relentless focus on business value.𝐓𝐈𝐌𝐄𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐌𝐏𝐒(0:00) Intro(1:30) Previous Experience(2:21) Defining ROI in robotics(5:12) Shortening payback cycles(7:18) Resources for operators(8:35) Inputs that define ROI(9:55) Evaluating site readiness(12:07) Early signs of a successful deployment(15:29) Getting ground-truth data(18:10) Responding to downtime(20:41) Dealing with regulation(23:05) Responding to downtime(25:28) ClosingThis episode is brought to you by Miru, Config Management for Scaling Robotics Teams.

Joining us in Episode 1 is Joshua Chaitin-Pollak, an industry veteran in robotics. He was formerly:An early software engineer at Kiva Systems, which was later acquired by Amazon, and is now Amazon Robotics. They've now deployed over 1 million robots, making them the largest robot fleet in the world.Software lead at 6 River Systems, acquired by Shopify, and now spun out to Ocado.Software lead at Pickle Robot (Series B)He now leads Software at ATI, a Series A tire-installation robotics company. And they're hiring!In this episode, Josh talks about software operations lessons from scaling a fleet, how to stand up a TechOps team, and what he's focusing on starting from day 0 to make his fleet ready for scale.𝐓𝐈𝐌𝐄𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐌𝐏𝐒(00:00) Intro(00:22) The biggest fleet Josh has scaled(01:49) How do you operate large fleets?(03:24) How to forecast when things start breaking(05:59) Best practices for software operations(07:27) Combating process theater(09:27) What is TechOps/RobotOps?(10:21) What backgrounds make strong TechOps hires?(11:51) The relationships between TechOps and other functions(13:25) Biggest bottleneck for software teams in robotics today𝐒𝐏𝐎𝐍𝐒𝐎𝐑𝐒This episode is brought to you by Miru, Config Management for Scaling Robotics Teams.