Apptronik and NASA Roll Out Humanoid Robot

A spin out of the Human Centered Robotics Lab at the University of Texas at Austin, startup Apptronik has some serious R&D behind it. Two of the company co-founders were part of NASA's Johnson Space Center Valkyrie team, working on the actuators and controls of the humanoid robot, as well as participating in the DARPA Robotics Challenge to build a versatile "hero robot" that could do all the things needed in a disaster relief scenario. These projects became advanced R&D work to eventually commercialize a more versatile robot that fills the need of working in an environment of unstructured tasks. And, despite the look of the robots the company has in its portfolio--like Astra, an upper body humanoid robot designed to operate with and around humans on a mobile platform, and Draco, a biped designed for agile dynamic walking--the company says it's solving a huge problem in manufacturing. "In manufacturing there are structured and highly repeatable tasks. Where we see this going is robots [designed] for the unstructured world," said Jeff Cardenas, Apptronik co-founder and CEO.