Tim Swift

Tim Swift is the founder and CEO of Roam Robotics, the San Francisco company building lightweight exoskeletons out of high-strength fabric and compressed air instead of heavy steel and motors. A UC Berkeley mechanical engineering PhD, he was one of the original three-person team that invented the Ekso exoskeleton at Ekso Bionics, then went to Otherlab before starting Roam in 2014. His bet: that wearable robots can weigh five pounds, cost a few thousand dollars, and be something a regular person buys to ski longer, hike farther, or move with less pain - not a tens-of-thousands-of-dollars hospital machine.