motion-planning
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Brandon Contino Taught a Robot to Pick the Produce Aisle
He started with neural prosthetics, followed a water problem into agriculture, and discovered that the hardest part of a tomato is persuading a machine to pick it quickly, gently and all day long.
The Robot That Picks a Tomato Better Than You Can
Two Pitt engineers spent months living in greenhouses to learn why picking a tomato is so hard for a machine. Their answer, the GR-100, now harvests faster than the humans it works alongside.
Realtime Robotics, Inc.
Realtime Robotics is a Boston-based deep-tech company that gives industrial and collaborative robots the ability to plan collision-free motion in real time. Spun out of DARPA-funded research at Duke University in 2016, its RapidPlan software and RapidSense perception system let robots generate and adjust their own paths in microseconds, cutting the time and cost of programming, deploying, and coordinating multiple robots in a shared workspace. Its technology is used by manufacturers including the BMW Group, and the company is backed by strategic investors such as Mitsubishi Electric, HAHN Automation, and SAIC Capital.
Peter Howard
Peter Howard is co-founder and CEO of Realtime Robotics, a Boston-based company building motion-planning software that lets industrial robots plan collision-free paths in milliseconds. A serial entrepreneur with an MIT management degree, he has founded five companies, taken two public, and now runs a Series B robotics firm working with Fortune 100 automakers and manufacturers.
Jacobi Robotics
Jacobi Robotics is a UC Berkeley spinout building AI-powered motion planning software that lets industrial robot arms be programmed and deployed in under a day instead of a month. Its platform generates collision-free trajectories in under a millisecond, and its flagship product, the Jacobi OmniPalletizer, handles real-time mixed-case palletizing without pre-sequencing. Founded in 2022 and launched publicly in 2024 with a $5M seed round, the company partners with robotics providers like Formic and ABB to bring faster, cheaper automation to manufacturers and warehouses.
Anyware Robotics
Anyware Robotics is a Fremont, California startup building deployable physical AI for industrial work. Its first product, Pixmo, is a mobile robot that drives into a shipping container or trailer and unloads boxes - up to about 1,000 cases per hour - using a force-sensing collaborative arm and an AI stack the company calls AnywareOS. Founded in 2023 by former UC Berkeley researchers and FANUC engineers, the company aims to take over the back-breaking jobs that warehouses can no longer reliably staff.
Max Cao
Max Cao is the co-founder and CEO of Jacobi Robotics, an Emeryville, California startup building AI-first software that programs industrial robot arms up to 20x faster. A mechanical engineer trained at Imperial College London and UC Berkeley's BAIR Lab under Ken Goldberg, and a former McKinsey consultant, Cao left academia to attack a problem most people never see: the way robots are programmed has barely changed since the 1980s. Jacobi's motion-planning technology cuts deployment from a month to under a day, claims 1000x less compute, and handles the singularities that freeze robot arms mid-task. The company launched publicly in July 2024 with a $5M seed round led by Moxxie Ventures.
Thomas Tang
Te (Thomas) Tang is Co-Founder and CEO of Anyware Robotics, a Fremont, California-based startup building AI-powered mobile robots for warehouse logistics. A UC Berkeley robotics PhD and founding member of FANUC's Silicon Valley research center, Tang combines deep academic research with industrial commercialization experience. His flagship robot, Pixmo, autonomously unloads shipping containers at 1,000 boxes per hour, won MHI's Best New Innovation award at ProMat 2025, and helps customers reduce receiving labor costs by up to 60%. In March 2025 Anyware Robotics closed a $12M seed round led by GFT Ventures, accelerating commercial deployments with leading third-party logistics providers.