In this interview segment, George Bandarian and an unnamed speaker discuss the rapid upcoming expansion of robotics, predicting billions of robots within the next decade. The speaker notes a major shift from niche, single‑purpose robotic solutions (e.g., box‑taping robots) toward general‑purpose, often humanoid, platforms. Parallel to hardware changes, software architectures are evolving from classical control and motion‑planning pipelines to foundation‑model‑style autonomy stacks that can handle a wide variety of tasks, akin to large language models. The conversation culminates with a reference to the speaker’s company, which has built a universal safety layer—dubbed the "3 Laws"—intended to enable higher‑performance robots to operate safely around people, a capability that helped the startup attract acquisition interest from Amazon.
Are we going to have billions of robots in the next few years?
The next decade. Few years is possible for sure. In the next decade. But I'm confident to say in the next decade. You know, we're seeing a lot more general-purpose form factors in robotics. When I was first, you know, looking into robotic startups a couple years ago, everyone was doing, you know, like one very specific vertical, building the world's best box taping robot. And now it's about, you know, a bunch of companies trying to tackle these general-purpose machines. Like humanoids we're seeing a lot of hype in right now. So that's one big axis of change in robotics. And then the other one, of course, being the software architectures. I studied traditional classical control theory and motion planning. Now we're seeing a lot of foundational models, kind of the robotics analog of large language models in terms of how can you build one autonomy stack that can handle a wide variety of tasks.
And the solution you guys had built the universal safety layer for robotics, right?
You know, of course you're gonna have the intelligent software governing what the robot does. You also need a safety system in order to deploy these robots around people. And the problem became the autonomy or the decision-making, the brain, was getting so much more complex and capable and performant, but the safety systems are kind of stagnant. And so you end up getting limited in your performance by the bounds of your safety system, not the bounds of your hardware platform or your autonomy software. And so 3 Laws' mission is not necessarily to make industrial robots safer, because there's already an extremely high bar of safety for industrial robots. It's how can we leverage all of these advancements we're seeing with new form factors and AI and actually get that performance gain instead of being restricted by the safety systems of today.
