Image Credits:<\/strong> Apptronik<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Cardenas says the company bootstrapped for much of its existence, until hitting around 40-50 people. It will be exploring a Series A this year, following the official unveiling of its full humanoid system this summer. \u201cWe have all of these building blocks,\u201d he adds. \u201cA lot of it has been iterating and trying new ideas. The advantage to bootstrapping is we\u2019ve believed in this for a long time. We\u2019ve been at this now for about a decade as a team, from Valkyrie.\u201d<\/p>\n

At the moment, the company is working on walking and building out the robot\u2019s core functionality prior to launch. It understandably wants to demonstrate that the product actually functions as planned prior to showing it to the world. It\u2019s a markedly different approach to what Tesla has been doing with Optimus, and if everything goes according to plan, it will propel the firm to its next major raise.<\/p>\n

Cardenas shows me images \u2014 both renders and photos \u2014 of Apollo, the system it plans to debut this summer. I can\u2019t share them here, but I can tell you that the design bucks the kind of convergent evolution I\u2019ve described, which found Tesla, Figure and OpenAI-backed 1X showing renders with a shared designed language. Apollo looks \u2014 in a word \u2014 friendlier than any of these systems and the NASA Valkyrie robot that came before it.<\/p>\n

It shares a lot more design qualities with Astra. In fact, I might even go so far as describing it as a cartoony aesthetic, with a head shaped like an old-school iMac, and a combination of button eyes and display that comprise the face. While it\u2019s true that most people won\u2019t interact with these systems, which are designed to operate in places like warehouses and factory floors, it\u2019s not necessary to embrace ominousness for the sake of looking cool.<\/p>\n

In some ways, the general-purpose part is harder than the humanoid bit. That\u2019s not to say that building a fully mobile and articulate bipedal robot is easy by any stretch of the imagination, but there\u2019s a big chasm between special and general purpose. The precise definition of the latter is a conversation for another day, but for many, the label describes a system that is fully adaptable on the fly. For some, that means something like an API and app store for third-party developers to create skills, but the systems still have to adapt to their surroundings. Ideally, it\u2019s a machine that can do any task a human can.<\/p>\n

Too often, people fail to recognize the vast middle ground that is multi-purpose systems. For the time being, this is a much more pragmatic place to operate within. The Tesla notion of a robot that can work in the factory all day, do your grocery shopping and come home and cook you dinner feeds into existing outlandish expectations that have been fueled by decades of science fiction.<\/p>\n

\u201cTo get it to do multiple things,\u201d Cardenas says, \u201cit\u2019s still early days, but there are enough applications where if we can do simple things like move a box from point a to point b, there are tens of thousands of units\u2019 worth of demands for those applications.\u201d<\/p>\n

Like all work in the space, these conversations require the caveat that we\u2019re still in the extremely early stages. Agility has arguably come furthest in terms of proving out the efficacy of a humanoid (or at very least bipedal) robot in a warehouse setting. But even they have a long way to go.<\/p>\n

Regardless, the next few years will offer some fascinating insight into where these culminations of decades worth of research are heading.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

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