The Road Ahead for Robotics: Insights from Motional's Major and Foundation's Pathak

The Robot Report Podcast · 20 Jun 2025 · 1h 35m

What this episode covers

Laura Major, CEO of Motional, discusses the company's autonomous vehicle strategy, emphasizing the shift from technical to business leadership, the use of AI for long-tail problem solving, and their safety record of zero at-fault accidents over 2 million miles. Sankaet Pathek, founder and CEO of Foundation, explains his company's rapid 13-month journey from idea to deployment of a humanoid robot for manufacturing, highlighting their proprietary actuator design and deep variational Bayesian filters (DVBF) for AI. The episode covers the strategic choice to target structured industrial environments to accelerate data collection and the challenges of scaling production to achieve sub-$20,000 unit costs.

Most relevant to

early-stage companies

Topics

Mentioned

Companies: Motional, Foundation, SoftBank, TSMC, Agility Robotics, Figure, Eptronic, Synapse
Products: Ionic 5

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The Road Ahead for Robotics: Insights from Motional's Major and Foundation's Pathak

What this episode covers

Most relevant to

Topics

Mentioned

Related episodes from other shows

Ep 4- The Hardware Story of Ati Motors | Autonomous Robots for Material movement in Factories

191: The State of Robotics: Live From the 2024 Robotics Summit & Expo in Boston, MA

172: How To Stay Focused on Your Mission and Deliver Robotic Solutions at Scale with Rapid Robotics CEO & Co-Founder Jordan Kretchmer

Kyle Vogt, founder of Twitch, Cruise, and The Bot Company, on AI, home robotics, and small-team innovation

Perspectives on Automation, AI, & the Future w/ Andy Lonsberry