Boris Sofman (Carnegie Mellon Robotics Institute, PhD, 2010) has experienced many stages of the company-building journey in robotics: founding startups from scratch, scaling products to mass market, and operating within one of the world’s most ambitious and expensive technology programs. At Anki, he took an idea from prototype to millions of consumer robots in homes around the world. At Waymo, he was part of the leadership team during the inflection point from a decade of R&D into one of the most dramatic commercial adoptions in tech history. Now, at Bedrock Robotics, he’s bringing autonomous systems to 50-ton construction machines to help America build infrastructure at an unprecedented speed and scale.

In this lecture, Boris will share an honest account of that journey and its lessons, including the energizing wins, the wrong turns and painful surprises, and the moments where an earlier experience turned out to matter more than expected. Closing with a deeper look at Bedrock, he will share why he believes autonomous construction is one of the most important problems robotics can tackle right now, driven by a unique convergence of maturing technology and critical industry need. For students at the beginning of their own paths, this is a talk about how a career in robotics and entrepreneurship might actually unfold, the many variables one navigates in the journey, and why the connections you cannot yet see may end up being the most valuable ones.

About the Lecture: The Yata Memorial Lecture in Robotics is presented by the Robotics Institute, in conjunction with the SCS Distinguished Lecture Series. Teruko Yata was a postdoctoral fellow in the Robotics Institute from 2000 until her untimely death in 2002. After graduating from the University of Tsukuba, working under the guidance of Prof. Yuta, she came to the United States. At Carnegie Mellon, she served as a post-doctoral fellow in the Robotics Institute for three years, under Chuck Thorpe. Teruko’s accomplishments in the field of ultrasonic sensing were highly regarded and won her the Best Student Paper Award at the International Conference on Robotics and Automation in 1999. It was frequently noted, and we always remember, that “the quality of her work was exceeded only by her kindness and thoughtfulness as a friend.” Join us in paying tribute to our extraordinary colleague and friend through this most unique and always exciting lecture.

Keywords:

Alumni, Robotics Institute (RI), School of Computer Science