Featured projects

Walden Robotics: Building useful, general-purpose robots

Lead robot character and industrial design. I also build capable compliant end effectors and I lead the team that designed, built and maintains our first deployed robot fleet.

I'm excited to finally share what we've been working on at Walden Robotics.

Over twenty years now in robotics, and my motivation hasn't changed: Build robots that people want around, robots that help us, work alongside us, and amplify us. Robots that unburden us and enable us to focus on what makes us happiest and thrive. I am lucky to have the best team of creative and dedicated people to build these with! We are deploying in the real world and making a real impact, learning hard lessons with positive, constructive, and inspiring feedback coming our way every day.

Deployment Mission Patch
website Walden Robotics: General-purpose robots that continuously learn & improve while performing real work

blog Why Walden? by Russ Tedrake
press Toyota-Backed Startup Walden Robotics Comes Out of Stealth With $1.1 Billion Valuation (Bloomberg)
press Walden Robotics Launches with $300 Million to Put General-Purpose Robots to Work Today (Business Wire)
Boston Dynamics and Toyota Research Team Up on Robots
On-site Manager and Whole-Body Manipuation Advocate. The project is designed to leverage the strengths and expertise of each partner equally. The physical capabilities of the new electric Atlas robot, coupled with the ability to programmatically command and teleoperate a broad range of whole-body bimanual manipulation behaviors, will allow research teams to deploy the robot across a range of tasks and collect data on its performance. This data will, in turn, be used to support the training of advanced LBMs, utilizing rigorous hardware and simulation evaluation to demonstrate that large, pre-trained models can enable the rapid acquisition of new robust, dexterous, whole-body skills.
BD-TRI LBM Mission Patch
BD TRI Blog Post
Meet Punyo, TRI’s Soft Robot for Whole-Body Manipulation Research

Tech Lead and Senior Manager. From project pitch, hiring and project management, to integration of our philosophy and expertise into TRI's Large Behavior Models division, I built and led a passionate, multidisciplinary team on a mission to help people with the bigger, bulkier tasks in everyday life. We built a research platform, Punyo, that embodies this mission.

The Punyo team focused on whole-body manipulation using the robot's arms and chest to complement TRI’s other efforts in fine robot hand and gripper-based dexterity. We continue to to develop new hardware and algorithms that enable truly capable robots to share our homes, physically interact with us, and help us move and manipulate large, heavy, and unwieldy items. [blog post] / [project page]
Early Punyo Concept Art
Early Punyo Concept Art
Soft-Bubble Grippers for Robust and Perceptive Manipulation
Designed and developed highly-compliant, visuotactile gripper with pressure, geometry, and shear force sensing for robust, perceptive, and controlled manipulation and human-robot interaction. Shared design and build instructions publically to promote visuotactile sensing and compliant manipulation in both acedemia and industry. [punyo.tech] / [project page]
Early Punyo Concept Art
Design of a Soft Upper Body Robot for Physical Human-Robot Interaction
Designed and developed a huggable, toy-sized robot with a soft skin robust to playful physical interaction. The upper body, including the arms, belly, chest, and back, has soft 3D-printed air-filled bubbles connected to pressure sensors to sense contact and provide protection to the child and robot while interacting. This soft tactile-sensing skin covers underlying actuators, the rigid 3D-printed frame, and 3D-printed bearings. [project page]
Snapbot: A Reconfigurable Legged Robot
Designed and developed experimental modular hardware for Snapbot, a reconfigurable legged robot that is able to walk using various locomotion styles as its legs get removed, reattached, and swapped around. [project page]
Maverick Robot Animation User Interface and Software Development
Designed and developed robot control user interface for a 3ds Max-based toolset that allows digital artists to animate and constrain high degree of freedom robotsm working closely with end users, including professional artists and producers, to create a comfortable interface that inspires creative, productive, and cutting edge results. [project page]