The most interesting work around AI doesn’t occur at the height of the hype cycle.

Kence Anderson has watched promising ideas overperform in demos, underperform in reality, and eventually re-emerge as something more modest and more useful. This episode focuses on that middle ground, where engineering judgment replaces speculation and progress looks slower than the headlines suggest.

An engineer who led autonomous systems work at Microsoft and now runs AMESA, Kence brings that experience into A3’s Designing Industrial AI Agents course.

Learn more about Amesa: https://www.amesa.com/ 

Connect with Kence: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kence/

We’d love to hear from you! Have thoughts or guest suggestions? Reach us at [email protected].

You can find the transcript and more episodes of Automated at automated.fm. 

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After three decades in consumer robotics, Colin Angle is still asking the hardest questions about trust, value, and what robots are actually for.

Colin Angle, co-founder and former CEO of iRobot, joins Automated for a candid conversation about the rise of consumer robotics, the collapse of the Amazon acquisition, and what comes next for physical AI.

He explains why Roomba was never a “science project,” how regulatory delays reshaped the company’s future, and why the next generation of robots must focus on trust, value, and real human interaction, not just humanoid hype.

The conversation also looks forward. Colin, now the CEO of Familiar Machines & Magic, shares how his thinking has evolved after three decades in consumer robotics, why trust and value creation remain the hardest problems to solve, and what excites him about the next era of physical AI, from emotionally intelligent machines to a smarter, more human-centered home.

Connect with Colin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/colinangle/ 

Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected]. 

You can find the transcript and more episodes of Automated at automate.org/podcast. 

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The current interest in robotics follows a pattern we’ve seen before. Eric Danziger has spent years working through those cycles and offers perspective on how things are actually playing out.

Invisible AI CEO Eric Danziger joins Automated to cut through the hype around humanoids, self-driving cars, and AI demos. Drawing from his time in the U.S. Army, Carnegie Mellon’s robotics program, and Silicon Valley startups, Danziger explains why physical AI moves more slowly than software, and why vision, infrastructure, and manufacturing realities matter more than flashy demos. A grounded conversation about what’s possible now, what isn’t, and what it will really take to automate the physical world.

We’d love to hear from you! Have thoughts or guest suggestions? Reach us at [email protected].

You can find the transcript and more episodes of Automated at automated.fm. 

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Subscribe to the Automated Newsletter: 

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Robotics has a habit of compressing timelines in theory and stretching them out in practice. Few people are better positioned to talk about that gap than Vincent Vanhoucke, whose work spans the early days of deep learning at Google and the ongoing challenge of scaling autonomous systems at Waymo.

Vincent Vanhoucke, distinguished engineer at Waymo and former leader at Google Robotics and Google Brain, joins Automated for a wide-ranging conversation on embodied AI, robotics, and autonomous driving.

From the early days of deep learning to today’s foundation models, Vincent breaks down why scaling is harder than innovation, how robotics and AI finally converged, and what humanoids can learn from the long road to self-driving cars.

Listen to Vincent’s podcast: AI in Motion https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLCkt0hth826G9AtnOrQsPbKKD5JmdaMXb&si=Nes4oraGJT4d4bia

We’d love to hear from you! Have thoughts or guest suggestions? Reach us at [email protected].

You can find the transcript and more episodes of Automated at automated.fm. 

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Subscribe to the Automated Newsletter: 

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True Ventures was an early investor in key robotics startups like Diligent and Bear Flag, thanks, in part, to Rohit Sharma’s thoughtful eye. The venture partner discusses how the firm determines early stage successes and charts his family’s journey from India farm to Palo Alto boardroom. 

From ag robotics and humanoids to long investment timelines, founder empathy, and why optimism matters in venture, this conversation goes deep on how transformative technologies actually make it into the world. 

We’d love to hear from you! Have thoughts or guest suggestions? Reach us at [email protected].

You can find the transcript and more episodes of Automated at automated.fm. 

Unlock full access to Automated and explore everything automation. Subscribe today and leave a review on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify.

Subscribe to the Automated Newsletter: 

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‘‘Twas the night before Automated and all through TRI, not a robot was stirring, just Erin McColl and I. We watched several YouTube videos with great glee, for the latest in AI and autonomy.” 

Welcome to this end-of-year special where host Brian Heater and Toyota Research Institute’s Erin McColl break down the most compelling robot videos of 2025. What’s real, what’s hype, and what actually moved automation technologies forward. From diffusion policies and dexterity challenges to home robots, humanoids, and honest failure cases, this episode explores the trends shaping robotics heading into 2026, plus the reveal of the 2025 Readers’ Poll winner.

See the full list of 10 videos under consideration on YouTube. 

We’d love to hear from you! Have thoughts or guest suggestions? Reach us at [email protected].

You can find the transcript and more episodes of Automated at automated.fm. 

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Subscribe to the Automated Newsletter: 

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Ahead of Disney’s Avatar: Fire and Ash’s release, we’ve got one hot conversation with Ben Procter. The film’s production designer, who previously worked on the Transformers series and Prometheus, discusses how real-world robots influenced the sequel’s autonomous systems and mechs.

From Avatar’s crab suits to swarm construction robots, this conversation dives deep into how real robotics, industrial design, and human biomechanics shape some of cinema’s most iconic machines. Ben Procter explains how mech suits are piloted, why insects, not humans, are the real inspiration, and how realism makes science fiction hit harder.

We’d love to hear from you! Have thoughts or guest suggestions? Reach us at [email protected].

You can find the transcript and more episodes of Automated at automated.fm. 

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Subscribe to the Automated Newsletter: 

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For more than 30 years, University of Massachusetts Lowell professor Holly Yanco has been a leading mind in human-robot interaction. It seems the rest of the automation industry may finally be catching up with her decades of research.

Professor Yanco delves into the complexities of human–robot interaction, from telepresence robots and robot trust to assistive tech, exoskeleton advances, and the challenges of real-world deployment. She shares lessons from decades of testing, breaking, and improving robots, why telepresence robots never had their predicted breakout moment, and what it takes to build capability-driven systems people can actually trust. This episode covers: agricultural robotics, underwater testing, community-college talent pipelines, and what it really takes to grow the next generation of roboticists.

We’d love to hear from you! Have thoughts or guest suggestions? Reach us at [email protected].

You can find the transcript and more episodes of Automated at automated.fm. 

Unlock full access to Automated and explore everything automation. Subscribe today and leave a review on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify.

Subscribe to the Automated Newsletter: 

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For Grace Brown, a humanoid robot future is a hopeful future. Andromeda’s Abi is designed to build connections in an increasingly isolated world, focused on older adults in care facilities. It’s a group that is a prime target for transformative technologies, but is too often overlooked.

In this episode, she talks about designing Abi, the robot bringing real connection back into aged care, the jaw-dropping moments that proved it was working, and the obsession, grit, and magic behind building a billion-dollar startup from nothing.

We’d love to hear from you! Have thoughts or guest suggestions? Reach us at [email protected].

You can find the transcript and more episodes of Automated at automated.fm. 

Unlock full access to Automated and explore everything automation. Subscribe today and leave a review on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify.

Subscribe to the Automated Newsletter: 

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In 2018, Dusty Robotics quite literally got in on the ground floor of automating the $2 trillion U.S. construction industry. Founder and CEO Tessa Lau discusses the ups and downs of those early days, and what it means to go from engineer to executive.

We’d love to hear from you! Have thoughts or guest suggestions? Reach us at [email protected].

You can find the transcript and more episodes of Automated at automated.fm. 

Unlock full access to Automated and explore everything automation. Subscribe today and leave a review on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify.

Subscribe to the Automated Newsletter: 

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You can also find us on:

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