Right Hand Robotics is one of the leading companies in autonomous robotics, specifically autonomous grasping. Their robots are able to see and pick a wide range of products for eCommerce automation, and they do it completely by themselves. In this episode, the CTO of Right Hand Robotics, Lael Odhner, shares his experience and talks about how the company was founded and its early history. Lael is one of the few genius-level technologists driving the robotics engineering state of the art. Listen in to hear about how Lael and the team have changed the game with autonomous grasping by inventing some really unique hardware.   

In this episode, Lael and Tom discuss:   

Meeting professor Rob Howe from Harvard  Working on a DARPA autonomous grasping project  

The different types of robotic hands and how they have evolved recently  

Founding Right Hand Robotics  

Three key factors to selling robotic grasping systems    

Lael Odhner is a robotics researcher and designer with widely varied interests, including active material actuators, biologically inspired control systems, and robot hands. He attended Yale University as an associate research scientist where he and his team developed high-performance, low-cost robot hands for DARPA’s Autonomous Robotic Manipulation project. Dr. Odhner received his PhD in Mechanical Engineering from MIT, where he also received his M.S. and B.S.